The American Prospect #321

DAVID DAYEN: INSIDE AN ANTI-UNION MEETING

SARAH JAFFE: NINA TURNER’S RUN FOR CONGRESS

ROBERT KUTTNER: SOCIAL DEMOCRATS FALL IN EUROPE

I D E A S, P O L I T I C S & P O W E R

WETLAND Lake Charles, Louisiana, is on the front lines of the climate crisis.

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BONUS ISSUE, 2020 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

It’s Getting Harder to Keep the Power On. Climate change has led to an increasing number of extreme weather emergencies, and right now, America’s electric grid isn’t up to the task.

Infrastructure investment will help modernize the grid, ensuring the electricity stays on when we need it the most. And by including Buy America rules, we will invest taxpayer money right back into American workers, businesses, and communities.

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contents

VOLUME 32, NUMBER 4 JUL /AUG 2021 PAGE 32

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COLUMNS 4 PROSPECTS CAN OUR LEGAL SYSTEM BRING DONALD TRUMP TO JUSTICE? BY PAUL STARR

NOTEBOOK 7 HOW JOE BIDEN DEFANGED THE LEFT BY ALEXANDER SAMMON 10 HOLDING ELECTRICITY FOR RANSOM BY GABRIELLE GURLEY 12 THE NEW PRO-ABORTION GENERATION BY AMELIA POLLARD

FEATURES 14 HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN BY MARA KARDAS-NELSON WILL LAKE CHARLES, LOUISIANA, BECOME AMERICA’S LATEST CLIMATE SACRIFICE? 22 ANATOMY OF AN ANTI-UNION MEETING BY DAVID DAYEN HOW NO EVIL FOODS, A PLANT-BASED MEAT COMPANY, SQUASHED A UNION DRIVE 32 NINA TURNER IS REACHING FORWARD AND REACHING BACK BY SARAH JAFFE DEMOCRATS MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THEY COULD LEARN A LOT FROM THE BERNIE SANDERS ALLY. 40 THE AGONY OF SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC EUROPE BY ROBERT KUTTNER WHY DID SOCIAL DEMOCRACY COLLAPSE? CAN JOE BIDEN POINT THE WAY TO A RESURGENT TRANS-ATLANTIC DEMOCRATIC LEFT? 50 THE WAREHOUSE ARCHIPELAGO BY JOHN LIPPERT AND STEPHEN FRANKLIN AS MANY AS FOUR MILLION WORKERS LABOR IN CLUSTERS OF WAREHOUSES SCATTERED ACROSS THE UNITED STATES. MANY ARE MISLABELED AS ‘TEMPS’; ALL ARE POORLY PAID, AND ON-THE-JOB INJURIES ARE HIGH.

CULTURE 58 LAWFUL CARNAGE BY ROZINA ALI 61 HOLLYWOOD’S UPRISING OF ACTIVISM BY DANNY GOLDBERG 64 PARTING SHOT THE FINAL RUMSFELD MEMOS Cover: Rick Hickman / AP Photo

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Can Our Legal System Bring Donald Trump to Justice?

BY PAUL STARR

N

ot long from now, Donald Trump may reoccupy the national spotlight in a way no former president ever has before: as a defendant in one or more criminal trials who is simultaneously running to regain political power. The New York investigation of Trump’s business dealings has already produced the first of what may be a series of indictments of the Trump Organization and its officers, ultimately leading to Trump himself. Even more explosive are possible cases stemming from actions he took while in office, including his conduct related to the January 6th assault on the Capitol.

These legal cases will be unfolding in political time as Trump reasserts his power in the Republican Party in the runup to 2024 and claims the whole government is engaged in a massive conspiracy against him.

We are not done with Trump, and he is not done with us.

American history offers no precedent for criminal trials of a former (and prospective) president. Many people, not just Trump supporters, would probably prefer to avoid trying him since it may make him into a martyr; I too might have liked to say, “Let’s just move on.” If the seven Senate Republicans who

4 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial had been joined by ten other members of their party, the Senate could have disqualified him from holding federal office again, and the country might have turned the page. (Congress might also have used the 14th Amendment to impose the same disqualification.) But the Senate’s failure to convict has left no choice. As The Boston Globe declared in an editorial in June, “Now there is only one way left to restore deterrence and convey to future presidents that the rule of law applies to them. The Justice Department must abandon two centuries of tradition by indicting and prosecuting Donald Trump for his conduct in office.”

But whether the U.S. legal system can bring Trump to justice is an open question. The record in prosecuting the rich and powerful is not encouraging. We have a deep-seated culture of impunity that offers the privileged seemingly inexhaustible escape hatches from being held legally accountable.

So far, the life of Donald Trump has been a study in the culture of impunity: taxes dodged in the inheritance from his father, debts expunged through six bankruptcies, business failures eclipsed by his TV role as a supposed business genius, contractors stiffed,

allegations of sexual harassment or assault by at least 18 different women waved off. Trump’s entire life has taught him the lesson that he can defy the law and social norms and get away with it.

The presidency gave Trump a new basis for escaping legal accountability. Under a Justice Department opinion never tested in court, a president cannot be indicted while in office.

And, under an unwritten norm, the federal government does not prosecute former presidents for their actions in office once they have left it. That adds up to a perfect formula for putting presidents above the law for anything they do while president.

Consider how Trump never faced any consequences for violating the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bars federal officers from taking money or gifts from a foreign government. Other presidents have divested themselves of assets or put them in a blind trust, but Trump did neither. Shortly after his election, a Saudi lobbyist paid for 500 rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington as part of a lobbying campaign against a bill the Saudi government opposed—one of several known instances in which foreign governments or their representatives funneled money

to Trump. On January 23, 2017, three days after Trump took office, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed suit against him for violating the Emoluments Clause, but during the four years he was president the courts were somehow unable to resolve the issue. On January 25, 2021, the Supreme Court dismissed the emoluments case on the grounds that Trump’s departure from the presidency five days earlier rendered the case moot. The Court protected itself from having to make a hard decision; it failed the country.

The Emoluments Clause is an explicit anti-corruption rule in the Constitution, and our legal system could not figure out how to enforce it against Trump.

At Trump’s second impeachment trial, the majority of Republican senators used the same kind of escape hatch to avoid confronting his role in the January 6th insurrection.

They took the position that he couldn’t be convicted after leaving office, even though the Senate has previously convicted former officials at impeachment trials. The rationale is obvious: Such officials could resign after being impeached but before a trial began and thereby escape a conviction and the penalty of being disqualified from holding

Prospects

federal office again. It also makes no sense that the Constitution would leave Congress with no means of convicting presidents if they committed high crimes and misdemeanors so close to the end of their term that Congress would be unable to act in time.

Immediately after the Senate’s verdict, Mitch McConnell declared on the Senate floor that Trump was “still liable for everything he did while he was in office,” “didn’t get away with anything yet,” and could still face legal consequences. What McConnell and other Republicans will say if and when Trump is indicted remains to be seen.

But even apart from the predictable partisan opposition, the criminal justice system may not hold Trump accountable for two reasons. Unlike the Senate, it cannot hold Trump liable for his failures to perform the duties of the presidency. Criminal cases will turn on more narrowly defined criteria—criteria that are in some respects narrowly defined to protect private individuals from the power of the state, not to judge the actions of those with the highest public responsibilities.

Moreover, the criminal justice system operates slowly, and Trump’s lawyers may see to it that it operates so slowly that trials are delayed until he is in the midst of another presidential campaign, at which point the courts may postpone the cases indefinitely.

The reluctance of the courts to proceed against the leader of the opposition party may protect Trump in the cases involving his private business as well as his actions in office.

The charge by the House of Representatives against Trump in his second impeachment trial was “incitement of insurrection,” which could translate into at least two criminal charges—incitement and seditious conspiracy under the federal insurrection statute. In a 1969 case, Brandenburg v. Ohio, the

Supreme Court expanded First Amendment protections for “advocacy of the use of force or of law violations,” declaring that the government could not punish such advocacy except when it “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

In his post–impeachment trial speech to the Senate, McConnell castigated Trump in terms that are specifically relevant to the Brandenburg criteria: There is no question that

President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day.

The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.

And their having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories, and reckless hyperbole which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet Earth. …

The leader of the free world cannot spend weeks thundering that shadowy forces are stealing our country and then feign surprise when people believe him and do reckless things.

McConnell then went to answer a Trumpian defense, distinguishing what Trump did from what “many politicians” do when they “make overheated comments or use metaphors that unhinged listeners might take literally”: This was different. This

was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

The unconscionable behavior did not end when the violence began. Whatever our ex-president claims he thought might happen that day, whatever reaction he says he meant to produce, by that afternoon, he was watching the same live television as the rest of the world. A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.

McConnell noted that although “it was obvious that only President Trump could end this,” he did not “do his job” and “take steps so federal law could be faithfully executed, and order restored” but instead “watched television happily as the chaos unfolded” and “kept pressing his scheme to overturn the election!”

But then, after making the case that Trump knew that he was provoking “imminent lawless action,” McConnell gave himself an escape hatch if Trump is charged criminally with incitement: “By the strict criminal standard,” McConnell said, “the president’s speech probably was not incitement.” We can be sure that is exactly what Trump’s lawyers will argue—that Trump did not explicitly call for the use of force against Congress, even though he invited it and reveled in it while his followers were assaulting the Capitol.

Trump’s defenders will also likely insist that he is not guilty of seditious conspiracy because he didn’t call explicitly for the use of force in whatever private communications took place between Trump or his aides and the insurrectionists—as though his public encouragement was not plain evidence of his role.

But none of this may matter because in the cases that may be brought against Trump, the courts may never get to a final verdict. So cautions Yale Law

professor Bruce Ackerman.

In a conversation with me about the potential Trump prosecutions, Ackerman noted that these cases will be a “race against time”—of legal time against political time—and the lawyers that Trump retains will have plenty of opportunities to run out the clock. Republicanappointed judges may also contribute to slow-walking the cases until the point in 2023 when the next presidential election season has begun, at which time there will be constitutional arguments for the courts to avoid making any decision.

In other words, like the emoluments case or the second impeachment trial, the criminal prosecutions may end, not with a verdict, but with the evasion of a verdict—if, in fact, there are prosecutions. In our culture of impunity, there are always higher reasons for letting the big shots off. After the financial crisis, the higher reason for not prosecuting the corporate leaders responsible for abuses was the supposed damage that the whole economy would suffer. Now the higher reason will likely be that indicting Trump would set a woeful precedent for criminal prosecutions of former political leaders. But if prosecution is ruled out, why would presidents—including perhaps Trump again in 2025— believe the law can be enforced against them?

Trump has repeatedly bet that he could defy the law and get away with it because the country’s legal institutions are too slow and too weak to stop him. He’s been right his whole life. And Trump himself is just the most conspicuous case of the failure of the criminal justice system to enforce the laws against the privileged and the powerful. If the system is unable once again to do anything about his violations of law, the verdict may fall on the system itself and those who have sworn to defend the Constitution but just can’t figure out how to do it. n

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

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The Sunrise Movement’s June 28 protest was a rare moment of dissent from progressive groups.

How Joe Biden Defanged the Left The White House has used access to quiet would-be progressive critics.

CAROLINE BREHMAN / AP PHOTO

BY A L E X A N D E R S A M M O N ON JUNE 28, over 500 members of the Sunrise Movement, D.C.’s most vocal youth climate group, blockaded the entrance to the White House for hours. Their demands included a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps, a New Deal–style jobs program, as part of the administration’s infrastructure package. A modest $10 billion CCC, less than one-tenth of Sunrise’s initial vision, was part of President Biden’s American Jobs Plan proposal when it was first unveiled months earlier; in the emaciated bipartisan infrastructure framework Biden agreed to in June, not one dollar remained. In

fact, nearly all of the major climate commitments, save some money (a fraction of what was proposed) for electric vehicles and public transit, were similarly absent from the $579 billion revision.

The protesters were joined by progressive House Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and the tone was something new for progressive groups in the Biden era: openly combative. Over a dozen protesters were arrested.

Sunrise members hoisted signs reading, “#NoClimateNoDeal, No

Compromises, No Excuses,” and “Biden, You Coward, Fight for Us.” Rep. Bowman, on the inadequacy of the new infrastructure proposal, was even more direct: “Fuck that!”

Just a few days prior, not outside the White House steps but on a private Zoom call, D.C. climate groups, along with a wide swath of senior staffers from major progressive organizations, huddled with White House officials for the unveiling of that very same bipartisan infrastructure deal.

Progressive groups meet with the White House every other Thursday; this was a special Friday session.

Among the groups in attendance was Real Recovery Now!, a progressive coalition spearheaded by veteran progressive strategist Sasha Bruce and former MoveOn executive director Ilya Sheyman, highlighted in Politico in March as the primary entity that

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

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White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a perceived ally of the left, has been effective in keeping progressive criticism of the president to a minimum.

away. Already, gun control, judicial reform, student debt relief, and much of health care and immigration reform have fallen by the wayside. Policing and criminal justice reform has bogged down in seemingly endless bipartisan negotiations, with Biden pushing no deadlines for action. Democrats have split on drug pricing, with moderates on the Hill chasing modest tweaks and progressives trying to go big to save hundreds of billions for additional fiscal spending. Tax reform, despite making it into the reconciliation bill, remains on the ropes. There’s no real plan to pass meaningful voting rights protection, which Biden admitted preemptive defeat on in a July speech. The PRO Act and some small percentage of immigration, like the $15 minimum wage before it, will be decided by the whims of the Senate parliamentarian. The president himself is one of the stronger remaining defenders of the filibuster. Yet the self-censorship and happy talk endure.

A DISEMPOWERED progressive flank during a Democratic administration is not a new phenomenon.

One need look no further than President Biden’s former boss, President Obama, for precedent. Obama’s strategy to gag progressives relied on the asperity of his chief of staff,

Rahm Emanuel, in a program former blogger Jane Hamsher once coined “the veal pen.” In a series of weekly meetings between progressive groups and administration officials called “Common Purpose,” Obama adviser Erik Smith, the White House comms team, and sometimes even Emanuel himself would impress upon progressive groups their duty not to criticize the White House’s priorities—on the bank bailouts, on health care—in the name of message discipline. This kept those groups in the veal pen, at risk of a cattle prod if they ventured out.

Occasionally, Emanuel would unleash his personal fury toward anyone even thinking of criticizing the Obama administration’s thoroughly unprogressive agenda, even though it directly contravened their own priorities. In one such meeting, Emanuel infamously called MoveOn “fucking retarded” for running radio ads against moderate Blue Dog Democrats who successfully downed progressive priorities in the health care package. Groups had to “earn their seat at that particular table by not bucking the White House,” as Hamsher wrote in 2009. Silence was the cost of access, and for at least a term and a half, it worked.

Progressives’ diminished standing in the Biden White House looks much different. While Emanuel

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would “keep pressure” on Joe Biden to deliver the most ambitious possible infrastructure package. The alliance, with members from Center for American Progress Action Fund, the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn, the National Domestic Workers Alliance/Care in Action, Community Change Action, and the Working Families Party, has articulated four top priorities on jobs, climate, care, and immigration.

Across those paramount concerns, Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure proposal left out the entirety of the care proposal, offered nothing on immigration, and featured startlingly little on climate; a reconciliation bill was still almost two months out.

And yet the reception featured no four-letter words and no accusations of cowardice. According to sources who were in the meeting, Sheyman was particularly obliging, raising his hand to personally congratulate the administration on the deal.

“This is the meeting for progressives and progressive advocacy organizations,” said one adviser close to the White House. “The bill doesn’t include a single one of his priorities, and yet the tone is incredibly civil, nobody is even saber-rattling.” Biden, meanwhile, was soon pledging not to veto the bipartisan package if it came to his desk without a reconciliation bill full of other Democratic climate priorities, threatening the absence of major environmental spending to come.

Criticism has been in surprisingly short supply during Biden’s first six months, from a left flank that’s been somewhere between docile and unctuous. D.C. progressive groups have lavished praise on Joe Biden as the next FDR, and when he’s indulged some un-FDR-like tendencies, they’ve continued lavishing. “The idea of Joe Biden being FDR 2.0 was just a message point without a body of work to back it up,” Murshed Zaheed, progressive political consultant and former political director of CREDO, told me. “They just desperately needed the folks who were fired up.”

The result has been a progressive flank that has been defanged in Bidenworld, unwilling to make public criticisms even as much of the legislative agenda has slipped

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would kill progressives with threats, Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, has killed progressives with kindness, with even more access and personal discussions. For veteran D.C. progressives, that has made for more amity, but an unwillingness to criticize Klain, a perceived ally. “Everyone talks about how it’s so much better than before, how they have way more access under Biden,” said one White House adviser.

While leaders of progressive D.C. groups have found themselves at the table at various engagements, events, shared press stunts, dinners with the vice president and at the White House, with a warmer reception than they ever got under Obama, it has not gotten their hands on the reins of the Biden agenda as it veers off course from its campaign-trail commitments. That, combined with the inchoate nature of calling out a president who just weeks ago was hailed as their vision of the next FDR, has translated into a kind of self-censorship. Groups have become unwilling to pressure the president, and subsequently unable to wield power.

As Bidenworld whittled away at the family care components of the package, not a single major women’s rights group rallied its members in support of the critical issues of universal pre-K, home health care, and child care, or put out a call saying that they would not support a bill in which these elements were left out. When Bidenworld left the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights out of the American Families Plan, the National Domestic Workers Alliance instead cheered the domestic work parts of the proposal that did get in. Those pieces vanished from the bipartisan framework; some

In rare moments and on fairly niche issues, progressive groups have called out Biden publicly, and it’s worked.

reappear in the detail-scant reconciliation bill despite very little public pressure exerted on the White House from the biggest groups that support it. In mid-July, care advocates announced a four-day interactive art exhibit on Capitol Hill, with an “art installation of miniature homes representing symbolic communities of care squads around the country,” and 3,000 care workers in attendance. It’s unclear whether tiny-home villages will make the care provisions sacred in the president’s eyes during negotiations.

Even as Biden has refused to lift a finger for H.R. 1, the voting rights bill that was a top priority of Public Citizen, the group has refused to strongly criticize him. Ditto MoveOn, which continues to blame “GOP obstruction,” despite Republicans being in the minority. No major progressive group has drawn a hard line on any legislative priority or whipped its members to call the White House in support.

The result, of course, is that roughly one-quarter of the American Jobs Plan and all of the American Families Plan now reside in an uncertain limbo, waiting to reappear in a reconciliation package. “There’s no strategy on everything else,” said Zaheed.

In rare moments and on fairly niche issues, progressive groups have called out Biden publicly, and it’s worked.

When news leaked that the president had chosen to go back on a campaign promise and would not raise the refugee limit from its Trump-era lows of 15,000 people per year, there was broad outcry from progressive and humanitarian groups. Biden quickly reversed course.

Still, fearful to cross Biden, progressive strategy has been reduced to training frustrations on Joe Manchin, who, critically, does not care what D.C. progressives say about him. And Manchin is likely soaking up enmity on behalf of a number of Democratic senators who are similarly opposed to more progressive ambitions, including Kyrsten Sinema, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Warner, Maggie Hassan, and, most importantly, Chris Coons, who is seen as Biden’s right hand.

While outside groups have been disarmed, progressives in Congress have found it increasingly difficult to

steer the agenda from inside. During negotiations of the American Rescue Plan, the only major legislation Biden has passed so far, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest and most organized sector of the party’s progressive wing, got functionally shut out of the $2 trillion package, with its top priority on raising the minimum wage left behind. Still, the entire CPC voted for the package despite having the votes to hold it up, just as they did (save for AOC) during a moment of leverage a year prior, as the stock market cratered ahead of the CARES Act. Indeed, the CPC has pointed to the size of the ARP package, more than any particular provision within it, as its biggest win.

Some progressive solace has been found in a series of Biden’s executive actions, like returning to the Paris climate agreement, raising the minimum wage for nearly 400,000 federal contract workers, and most recently issuing an executive order on combating monopoly power. Even there, though, Biden has taken a middle ground and avoided the most expansive executive actions, like canceling student debt or revoking pharmaceutical patents to lower drug prices.

There was some expectation that progressives would get at least some of their agenda enacted on the next legislative go-around. That has not yet happened, even though the $3.5 trillion package remains an encouraging figure for progressives. But there’s no more certainty with that aspect than there was in the spring when the bills were introduced, and three months have ticked away. As the agenda wanes, critical time runs off the clock ahead of the 2022 elections, which thanks to redistricting, will almost certainly result in Republicans retaking the House. The Senate is in play as well.

The early days of the Biden era were hailed as a win for progressives, who placed non-antagonistic staffers within the higher ranks of the administration. But those same people have ably brought progressives into the fold and preempted their criticisms, offering access instead of influence. In many cases where progressives won the battle of personnel, they’re losing the war of legislation. n

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Holding Electricity for Ransom The electric grid is a prime target for hackers, but the private companies that dominate the sector often put dollar signs before cyber sense.

BY G A BR I E L L E G U R L E Y A CYBER ATTACK on the electric grid is the one worst-case scenario that cybersecurity and emergency management professionals fear is imminent. They know that no one, from the utility company executives to the consumers who expect lights on, phones charged, and air-conditioners going full blast, are prepared for a prolonged and catastrophic electric outage.

The winter weather-related Texas grid failure previewed what can happen when the electricity stops flowing.

The problem is, in cyberspace, there are no impenetrable systems.

Anything designed by humans in the 21st century can be hacked.

Most alarming is how private-sector companies fail to pay attention to even the most basic cyber hygiene measures, like backing up computer systems, using multifactor authentication (which requires users to provide two or more types of data to gain access to a network), and devising detailed plans to deal with security breaches.

One reason why: money. Many of the firms contracted to protect computer systems throughout the world have been bought up by private equity, which then cuts costs on R&D, offshores labor, and neglects maintenance in order to extract money for the fund managers, leaving businesses—and potentially critical infrastructure sectors like energy— vulnerable to ransomware attacks.

For example, the Kaseya ransomware attack hit about 1,500 companies just before the Fourth of July weekend and demanded ransoms ranging from $50,000 to $5 million.

REvil, the Russia-affiliated collective behind the attacks, offered up a decryption key to unlock all the affected systems across the globe for a cool $70 million in Bitcoin. Managed by Insight Partners, a private

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equity firm, Kaseya provides IT service management software to large and small companies alike.

While not a ransomware attack, the 2020 SolarWinds hackers breached and exfiltrated data from key federal agencies like the Pentagon by inserting malware into the company’s network monitoring software, which was distributed to users through software updates. SolarWinds is also a private equity–owned firm.

Forbes reported that Colonial Pipeline, another ransomware victim, has links to private equity dealmakers, including the venerable PE firm KKR and a pension fund in Canada. Colonial Pipeline, which moves gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels from the Gulf Coast production hubs to the Eastern Seaboard, failed to use multifactor authentication. The DarkSide group hackers attacked the company’s business systems (and apologized for doing that), and apparently did not go after the operational networks that control the flow of fuels. Company officials decided to pay a $5 million ransom and shut down those systems as a precaution.

(The new FBI Ransomware and Digital Extortion Task Force ferreted out $2.3 million of the ransom from a DarkSide Bitcoin wallet.)

But hackers don’t even have to shut down operations to create havoc.

Panicked drivers drained gas stations in the South dry, even in areas of Florida that do not rely on the pipeline for fuel.

AS THESE examples indicate, too much of the security burden has been placed on companies that are relentlessly focused on their profit motives, not national security. For too many companies, cybersecurity is still perceived as nice to have, but not an essential cost of doing business. Stronger oversight of the energy sector is likely in the offing now that

pipelines, a gateway to electricity production, have been exposed as one of the weakest links.

Ransomware attacks strike new targets every few seconds, according to the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Attacks can be fended off, or at least minimized, with the proper precautions—if companies take them. Most security failures are policy failures, not technology failures, according to Bruce deGrazia, the head of cybersecurity management and policy at the University of Maryland Global Campus. DeGrazia is a “huge fan” of bringing in penetration testers to test a company’s defenses by hacking into its systems.

Network segmentation, or keeping IT networks (that handle business functions, for example) separated from operations technology (which powers or controls energy systems), is another way to minimize the damage an intruder can do.

Hackers once focused on attacking individual computers and demanding hundreds of dollars in ransoms. Today, cyber extortion is big business. Criminals go after entire networks, encrypt a company’s data, and demand a ransom before they’ll provide a key to restore control. Often they will “exfiltrate” (copy or transfer) data and follow up with a second demand: Give them more money or they will publish the data.

COVID-19 was a boon for hackers, too. People working from home on their own devices made their job that much easier; there were no institutional firewalls to get through and no savvy co-workers to prod lax colleagues into better cyber hygiene.

Before the Colonial Pipeline attack, there was little need for geeklevel skills. A motivated individual could order ransomware on the dark web, and, with the right credentials to gain entry, launch an attack against a computer network. (Some groups even offered customer assistance to help out if their malware didn’t work.)

Although DarkSide and REvil have been taken offline by forces unknown (President Biden has indicated that the United States planned to act), hackers are likely to find other pathways to accomplish their goals.

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The entity behind the first cyber attack on American electricity assets was never identified.

“If you are looking to make a quick buck and pay the ransomware developer a commission or cut to use the exploit, it’s a pretty easy business,” Mike Moran of the U.S. Secret Service told a CISA National Cybersecurity Summit last year. Cracking down on cryptocurrency wouldn’t necessarily slow hackers down either.

In 2016, when North Korean hackers broke into the Bank of Bangladesh, they steered the money to gamblers in Philippine casinos, who laundered the funds into casino chips.

At the end of May, the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees liquid and natural gas pipelines, issued a security directive that “requires” companies to notify CISA of any unauthorized IT, operational, or physical intrusions; identify a cybersecurity coordinator who can be available 24/7; and report the results of a review of security measures to TSA and CISA. Firms can be assessed daily financial penalties (pegged to the severity of the incident) if they fail to notify CISA of a breach. TSA is “considering follow-on mandatory measures,” according to a DHS press release. Asked to clarify, a DHS spokesperson declined to “speculate on what may or may not happen in the future” when it comes to “issuing permanent regulations.”

The first attack on an American electric utility made public occurred in the West in 2019 and briefly knocked out firewalls that controlled communications between control centers and remote generating sites, but did not affect power. However, the utility had not deployed an

update released before the attack.

The intruder was never identified.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) oversees the electric grid and has established a set of mandatory compliance standards for energy companies, such as knowing what levels of access to the network are held by particular individuals and how a company plans to handle and recover from an attack.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has proposed rules to establish voluntary incentives to persuade companies to go above and beyond the NERC requirements. POWER magazine notes that the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, composed of large manufacturing firms, has called for natural gas pipelines to adhere to the same physical and cybersecurity mandates that the electricity sector does.

Colonial Pipeline’s exceptionally bad PR is likely to persuade some CEOs that paying a ransom is preferable to being summoned to Capitol Hill for a grilling. Cybersecurity experts have called for express prohibitions on paying ransom; so far, CISA and the FBI advise against it. Some companies and individuals have paid ransoms but never got the keys to release their data.

The partial recovery of Colonial’s ransom may give false hope to companies that the feds might be able to recoup at least some portion of their money. Then there are the companies that just may take the write-off.

Since ransoms are considered theft, some losses may be tax-deductible.

Companies can save money on

beefing up information security and instead pay ransoms where necessary (with the government kicking in a portion), and potentially come out ahead. If Congress wants to reduce private-sector complacency about the national-security threat that is cyber extortion, revisiting this section of the tax code may be in order.

In June, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the Senate Intelligence Committee chair, released a draft Cyber Incident Notification Act of 2021 that would require entities in critical infrastructure sectors and federal law enforcement to report cyber intrusions to CISA within 24 hours and provide limited immunity for reporting companies that would remain confidential. The proposed legislation does not address ransom payments; Warner has said that companies should at least disclose if they have paid a ransom.

The upheaval in the cyber attack insurance industry as ransomware attacks increase could speed shifts in the private-sector mindset.

Insurers are requiring clients to document the specific procedures employed to avoid breaches as a condition of coverage. A Washington Post report noted that insurers are also raising premiums and scaling back coverage.

The “lesson learned” guidance that NERC issued after the 2019 attack is full of reminders to pay closer attention to the basics, such as managing software patches that need to be made, relying on fewer “internetfacing” devices, and using virtual private networks that allow users to create private networks over public internet connections.

Confronting cyber threats requires a fundamental shift in thinking away from fortress-building—preventing hackers from getting in—and toward mitigating disruptions and getting back online. “When [companies] do their cybersecurity plans for their organizations, those plans must contain some aspect of their contingency plans, in other words, what are you doing to make sure that the damage is minimized?” says Stuart Madnick, an information technology professor emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “My suspicion is it gets nowhere near the attention it needs to have.” n

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The New Pro-Abortion Generation As Roe v. Wade faces its greatest challenge yet, young people are taking the reins to protect abortion access.

BY A M E L I A P O L L A R D EVERY DAY AT the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, resembles trench warfare. Painted like a shade of bubble gum, the center has affectionately earned the nickname the “Pink House.” But its modern windows and copper roof are shielded from the street. Black plastic tarps and panels guard patients’ privacy by keeping the protesters out of eyesight.

Around a dozen anti-abortion protesters often show up with bullhorns and picket signs, while volunteers for the Pinkhouse Defenders, a nonprofit organization, thwart hecklers by blasting music and escorting patients from their cars to the clinic’s waiting room.

In the last several months, volunteers have embraced TikTok as their weapon of choice, filming protesters and posting the videos on social media.

Sunna Savani, a second-year medical student at the University of Mississippi and a volunteer with the Pinkhouse Defenders, says Saturdays at the clinic are hectic. “They have street church with over 100 people, a mini-service blocking the roads,” she says, referring to worship services held in front of the abortion clinic. Savani is among the escorts who volunteer their time with the Defenders, 25 percent of whom are under the age of 30.

Abortions are as old as pregnancy itself. But abortion activism, especially in the United States, has entered a new era, with young people leading the charge against pro-life activists who have long made obtaining an abortion excruciatingly uncomfortable. (The trend to label the movement as “pro-abortion” rather than the more anodyne “prochoice” typifies the blunt posture of today’s advocates.) And while there are still in-the-street protests, proabortion advocacy has felt more urgent and inclusive in recent years, primarily focusing on grassroots organizing.

That is especially true in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to hear

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Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a case involving Jackson’s Pink House.

In May, the Court said it would consider the challenge to the state’s recent law to ban abortion after 15 weeks.

This will be the first abortion case the Court will hear that directly threatens Roe v. Wade. (If the Court overturns Roe, it would be up to states whether abortions remain legal.)

According to nearly a dozen young reproductive-health activists, Trump’s presidency and his judicial

nominations pushed young people to action. With their attention riveted by Supreme Court confirmation hearings in childhood bedrooms, college libraries, and first apartments, young people accepted that a successful challenge to legal abortion might be imminent. So when the Court decided to hear a case that could overturn Roe v. Wade, few of them were surprised.

“This case just feels like what we saw coming when Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Barrett were confirmed to the Supreme Court,” says Jessica Morandi, a rising senior at Harvard University who interned with the

Pro-abortion volunteers with the Pinkhouse Defenders in Jackson, Mississippi

ers of aborted fetuses and screaming at patients as they enter abortion clinics, some pro-life activists have even created Wi-Fi accounts near clinics with names like “Don’t Kill Your Baby.” And in March, a pro-life group bought a parking lot opposite an abortion clinic in Toledo, Ohio, so that its members would be within shouting distance of patients.

These right-wing tactics have inspired a bullish countermovement.

In the last decade, a decentralized network of abortion activists has pushed beyond the well-endowed and established organizations like Planned Parenthood, providing emotional and

ROGELIO V. SOLIS / AP PHOTO

nonprofit Abortion Access Front.

“This is just really the fears that were discussed then coming true.”

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University and author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present, says that up until recently, pro-choice establishment groups were concerned that younger people were not particularly active in the movement. “Some of the older activists believed younger people took for granted that Roe would be there,” she says. “It was unimaginable that there’d be another reality because they had grown up with it.”

The provocative tactics of pro-life advocates have caught the attention of those new to the abortion cause. In addition to hoisting post-

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physical support for people seeking out abortions at the local level.

REPRODUCTIVE-JUSTICE advocacy has started early, in some cases. In central Minnesota at Eagan High School, a group of recent graduates lobbied their school district to revamp its sex education curriculum, to include the issue of consent and LGBTQ-specific sex education, among other points. The way the students see it, there’s a clear sex education– to–abortion access pipeline; protecting abortions goes only so far if there are barriers to patients’ understanding of reproductive health.

“When young people are given the information they need to make their own choices, to make healthy and safe choices, comprehensive sex ed can quite literally save and change lives,” says Claudia Liverseed, a recent graduate of Eagan High School and one of the advocates who pushed for the reform.

Liverseed is active in another program, led by Planned Parenthood, to pass similar comprehensive sex education through Minnesota’s state legislature.

“I am again and again telling adults around me to get out of the way,” says Kat Otto, a Planned Parenthood community organizer in Minnesota who mentored Liverseed and her fellow students on their sex education initiative.

“These are the leaders. We need to listen to them. They are already doing the work.”

The larger movement of pro-abortion advocacy in many ways mirrors the drive at Eagan High School. The new wave of activism is pushing for greater inclusivity in the movement by bringing the LGBTQ community and people of color to the fore.

Solange Azor, 25, has volunteered and worked for abortion access funds and nonprofits since seeking out her own abortion while a junior in college. “I really got disillusioned with abortion organizing for a second because of rampant transphobia,” she says, adding that the movement had been dominated by white, straight, older women. While organizing, she was often the youngest person by ten years.

This sort of intersectional action—viewing abortion access as a racial, gender, and economic issue— is driven by young people. Azor says that the same young activists are changing the language around abortion.

“Abortion was previously only a women’s issue,” says A.P. Montesi, a 23-year-old volunteer with Pinkhouse Defenders. “But now it’s really about the LGBTQ community as well, and how it affects trans men. That was just absent in the older pro-abortion movement, and something that the younger generation has added.”

BUT YOUNG pro-abortion activists have come face-to-face with the difficulties of making progress on their agenda. Eagan High School administrators have delayed any real consideration of a change in curriculum, and the statewide bill in Minnesota has failed in three consecutive legislative sessions, amid pushback from lawmakers.

States like Mississippi and Arkansas have already passed such restrictive laws—requiring a 72-hour wait period or parental consent, for instance—that abortions are essentially out of reach for many residents.

Activists and nonprofits are still working to fight for policy change, such as lobbying for the Women’s Health Protection Act, a congressional initiative that would protect abortion access through legislation instead of the judiciary. But these groups have also devised other ways to support abortion-seekers, working around pre-existing legal restrictions and socioeconomic barriers to protect abortion access, even if their state does not.

Abortion funds, which are organizations that raise money to help low-income people pay for abortions, have recently put historically marginalized people at the center of the movement. A prime example is the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), a nonprofit organization that coordinates dozens of chapters nationwide. NNAF first began operating in the wake of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates for

restrictive abortion laws in 1992. “[NNAF] had a huge transformation in the last five to ten years where they were basically like, ‘We need Black and indigenous people and queer people in charge here,’” says Azor. “And we’re seeing more of that.”

Since 2015, Yamani Hernandez has led the organization as the executive director. On her website, she describes herself as a “visionary and strategic, queer, Black, Buddhist leader committed to radical compassion and healing justice.”

The movement has shifted from protecting only legal rights to instead placing a greater emphasis on access.

“One of the weaknesses historically of the pro-choice movement has been a lack of interest in access,” says Ziegler. “You’ve seen much more organizing around the availability of abortion pills or the availability for people to travel to places where they could get an abortion than we’ve ever seen before. People are planning for a world in which Roe is no longer.”

The youthful brand of abortion activism is also placing greater emphasis on emotional care, addressing the myriad pressures associated with the decision to pursue an abortion. Doulas have stepped in to provide one-on-one care during every stage of the abortion process.

With over half the country under some degree of abortion restrictions, doulas help patients navigate the onslaught of logistical hurdles. Their services embody the new form of decentralized, local abortion advocacy work that young people are championing nationwide.

Major nonprofit organizations have already emphasized legal and financial access. But the care component— focusing on emotional hardship—was largely neglected. Azor, who is a certified doula herself, says that is starting to change. “All the abortion doulas that I know are just young people who are really excited,” she says.

For Azor, her own involvement has been energized by watching individual states, especially Republican strongholds, restrict abortion access. “Bringing imagination to political work is how incredible movements happen and how progress happens,” she says. n

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RAIN HERE COMES THE AGAIN

Will Lake Charles, Louisiana, become America’s latest climate sacrifice?

By Mara Kardas-Nelson THE AGING CIVIC center sits just beyond a

string of waterfront mansions, lawns freshly mowed, and across from the bombedout Capital One Tower, one of the tallest buildings in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with dozens of wooden boards instead of windows. On a hot and sunny June morning, Jennifer Cobian, the soft-spoken assistant director of the Division of Planning and

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Development for the county government, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, uses a big, echoey room on the center’s ground floor to host residents of Greinwich Terrace, a low-income, primarily African American neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

Built in the 1950s for military families near the Chennault Air Force Base, the Terrace has been hemmed in by larger housing

developments, strip malls, and Interstate 210 in the decades since the base closed. As the city built up around it, the Terrace found itself at the bottom of an increasingly full bowl. Low-lying, it’s uniquely vulnerable to the city’s 62 inches of annual rainfall—nearly double the national average—as water tries and fails to snake its way around buildings and roads, no longer able to seep into

DAVID J. PHILLIP / AP PHOTO

bayous and fields. The Kayouche Coulee, a concrete-lined ravine abutting the neighborhood, regularly overfills in rainy weather. This came to a head this past year, as the city, which is just 15 feet above sea level and 30 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, faced four federally declared natural disasters.

During that time, Cobian was struck by the calls she was getting from some Terrace residents, who wanted to know about FEMA buyouts, available in one-off cases to homeowners with sustained and severe damage. Instead, Cobian recommended that the Terrace be

considered for a new, $1.2 billion voluntary buyout program, overseen by the state-run Louisiana Watershed Initiative, with federal funds from the Community Development Block Grant Mitigation Program. The idea, Cobian says, is for residents to get payments above the average home value in the area, if they agree to start over somewhere that’s not flood-prone: out of Greinwich Terrace, maybe even out of Lake Charles. She sees the program as the better of two unsavory options: either stay and risk more flooding, or get out.

On the same day, about five miles across

town, the Golden Nugget, a 22-story hotel and casino, is in full swing, with cars lining up at the valet by mid-morning. The Nugget sits on the edge of the Bayou Contraband, one of hundreds of waterways that wind through Southwest Louisiana. Across the water, plumes of smoke rise from the plants that dot Calcasieu and Cameron Parishes, major arteries of America’s petrochemical corridor and home to one of the state’s two liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals. (Louisiana exports over half of the country’s LNG.) The structurally unsound

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drop for President Biden’s bid for new infrastructure spending, arcs into the horizon.

The Golden Nugget, which remained standing throughout the year’s apocalyptic storms and reopened three weeks after Hurricane Laura touched down last August, was an apt location for what Mayor Nic Hunter was trying to prove. The city was hosting hundreds of housing developers, bankers, and construction executives from around the region for Lake Charles Investors’ Day. Over pastries and coffee, Hunter, who looks like a cross between Mr. Clean and a high school baseball coach, offered a vision for the future. He told the room that while “the inherent backbone of our economy”— petrochemicals—“is very strong,” the city wants to diversify. He touted plans for Port Wonder, a $20 million complex comprising a children’s museum and nature center with an adjacent microbrewery for the adults; music festivals like “Live @ the Lakefront”; exhibitions at the historic City Hall; and the Creole Nature Trail, a winding driving tour of bayous and swamps that offers alligator lookouts and mom-and-pop spots offering boudin, a local sausage.

Hunter wanted the investors to help build a brighter Lake Charles. While the last year has been unimaginably devastating, the wreckage also offers an opportunity to “build back better,” he said, borrowing Biden’s slogan. Throughout the day, Hunter and his team walked the attendees through the maze of federal monies already on offer and millions more hopefully on the way. Those could incentivize private developers to build affordable, storm-resistant housing in “the core of this city, areas that are more developed and that we want to see thrive,” like Lake Charles’s historic but anemic downtown.

His message was clear, if not particularly subtle: Just like the shimmering Golden Nugget, this storm-battered city can also withstand calamity and turn it into opportunity.

Equal parts fearless leader and downhome neighbor, Hunter peppered his speech with Teddy Roosevelt quotes and leaned into his “y’alls.” But his pitch teetered toward desperation, unhinged by too many contradictions. Hunter believes the

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Mayor Nic Hunter has a vision for rebuilding Lake Charles that sits uncomfortably with his support for the petrochemical industry.

federal government should support Lake Charles because “we export more LNG through Southwest Louisiana than anywhere else in this country,” with more on the way. While he called for “a very bold and honest conversation” about climate change after a massive spring rainstorm and flood, at the Nugget he wanted to keep politics out of the room, acknowledging that even with “everything that’s happening now with the energy sector, the petrochemical and LNG terminals are gold.”

Never was it mentioned that those same plants have also contributed to making life in Lake Charles nearly unbearable. His language of rebuilding focuses on physical changes—making buildings stronger, raising them off the ground, having generators immediately available in a storm—but not about moving away from extractive industries that fuel climate change.

A few key but unspoken questions underlined both Investors’ Day and the buyout meeting, one attended mostly by white investors, the other by elderly Black residents.

The region is under siege by natural forces spinning beyond human control, with Louisiana losing a football field of land every

hour to water. Does it make sense to reconstruct a city that almost inevitably will face more frequent and violent weather events?

Who will be able to survive the onslaught of storms, and at what cost? At what point in the cycle of renewal and devastation does anyone utter the forbidden word: enough?

FROM AN AIRPLANE , Lake Charles is a

mural of blue. The dark, murky waterways flow from bayous like the Nugget’s Contraband into Prien Lake, and then down to the Gulf. With climate change fueling more frequent and ferocious storms, that water has become a weapon.

The city was decimated by category-three Hurricane Rita in 2005, and inundated with water during Harvey in 2017. Last summer, during the most severe Atlantic hurricane season on record, category-four Laura, the strongest storm to hit the state in over a century, brought 150 mph winds to the city; category-two Delta brought torrential rains shortly thereafter. Then an unusual winter deep freeze burst pipes and cut off water supplies. And on May 17, up to 21 inches of rain fell in some parts of the city within just a few hours. It was the third-wettest day

ALEX BR ANDON / AP PHOTO

I-10 bridge, which recently served as a back-

in the city’s history, which includes “multiple landfalls of incredibly wet hurricanes,” according to NOAA. All told, 98 percent of the structures in Lake Charles suffered damage in these disasters. With Southwest Louisiana expected to face “more intense downpours in shorter time periods,” according to the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, the year felt more like a new reality than an anomaly.

Nearly a year after Laura made landfall, hundreds of bright-blue tarps still sprinkle the landscape, acting as makeshift roofs.

Many of Lake Charles’s 80,000 residents left, at least for a little while, fleeing to places like Mississippi, Arkansas, New Orleans, and Houston. An estimated 5,000 people are still displaced, according to the mayor, in large part because they have no homes to go back to. Southerly reported that the city lost about 8 percent of its population last year, the largest out-migration in the country.

While there’s no available analysis on the socioeconomic or racial makeup of those who left, many of the lower-income, primarily Black neighborhoods are still hollow.

When the storms hit, some of the city’s poorest residents didn’t have flood or homeowner’s insurance, or were simply unable to meet their deductible, which can reach tens of thousands of dollars. Many residents, regardless of income, have faced FEMA and insurance denials (at the airport, there’s a billboard for a lawyer who fights insurance companies that proclaims, “WHEN THEY WON’T PAY CALL MIKE!”). Rebuilding is always expensive, but even more so in a

With roofs ripped off and trees upside down in living rooms, the usable housing stock in Lake Charles has significantly diminished.

year full of sporadic supply chain interruptions from COVID. And contractors, sensing desperation, charge a premium for those who want their homes fixed fast.

With roofs ripped off and trees upside down in living rooms, the usable housing stock has significantly diminished, while demand has risen from residents seeking temporary living arrangements and outside contractors coming in to work on repairs.

“Right now, housing prices are through the roof,” says Alberto Galan, assistant to the administrator at the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury, responsible for overseeing the area’s recovery plan.

The day after Investors’ Day at the Nugget, in a sweaty conference room on the tenth floor of City Hall—the AC still hasn’t been fixed after the storms—Mayor Hunter explained that the city can’t “build back better” without federal dollars. Ten months in, he’s still waiting on funds from the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program (CDBG-DR), more commonly known as supplemental disaster aid. Those monies are regularly given after hurricane disasters—Katrina, Rita, Sandy, Harvey—often within a matter of weeks.

The state has asked for $3 billion, much of which would go to Southwest Louisiana.

But as the anniversary of Hurricane Laura approaches, no additional funding except for the usual FEMA, Section 8, and Small Business Administration support has come through. “It is just disheartening, unconscionable, and unfathomable that we are 300-plus days post Hurricane Laura and having been through four federally declared weather disasters over the course of nine months,” says Hunter, “and we have not achieved the same support from the federal government that other communities have achieved in a mere ten days after one natural disaster.”

The mayor wants to use some of those funds for housing, incentivizing new development while also offering reimbursements and grants to help people fix up broken homes.

But he’s been forced to wait along with his residents. “It just seems unfair and really crappy,” he says, “that other Americans are apparently viewed as more deserving of federal assistance in the aftermath of disasters

than people here in Southwest Louisiana.”

Without help, many Lake Charles neighborhoods remain empty and ghostlike. Meadow Drive, a street in a racially mixed, middle-income neighborhood near McNeese State University, has dozens of seemingly abandoned houses. One house has nothing but a work boot and a glittering vase on the front lawn. A few host tractors and RVs, where contractors or residents, or both, live during the recovery process.

One middle-aged resident, who asked not to be identified because she didn’t want to criticize the recovery effort, says that her family had just moved back into their home before the May 17 flood. After the rooms filled with water, the dining room table, “bless its heart,” collapsed when they tried to move it. “It’s like it had just been working too hard for too long.” All of her sons’ baby books were destroyed, along with nearly all the furniture. “It was like watching everything you have, just gone overnight.” They’re still living in the nearby town of Sulphur, and hoping to move back within the next two months after an NGO, Samaritan’s Purse, helps them fix their floors.

Whenever Mayor Hunter probes for information on the holdup, “the answer that I get is a really pathetic answer. It’s just that Washington, D.C., is more dysfunctional and stagnant and polarized today than it’s been in generations.” Hunter is a Republican who recently won election in a landslide; last November, 70 percent of Calcasieu Parish went for Donald Trump.

“When I talk to people about my disappointment, I cast a very wide net,” he says. “President Trump and the 116th Congress had a chance to act and now President Biden and the 117th Congress have a chance to act.”

After the May 17 flood, President Biden called Mayor Hunter, telling him that he “understood the great need.” Hunter even introduced Biden’s May infrastructure pep talk at the I-10 bridge. But when we met at the end of June, the mayor was “a little less optimistic about the substance and the productivity of that phone call” with each passing day.

JUST BEFORE THE storms, the Calcasieu

Parish Police Jury voted against taking down a statue of a Confederate soldier, called the

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South’s Defenders Memorial Monument, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. All four of the jury’s Black members voted for it to be removed; 10 out of 11 of its white members voted for it to stay. At the time, Mayor Hunter said the statue should be removed from its place in front of the city’s courthouse, but not “destroyed or erased.” Yet when Hurricane Laura later knocked the soldier clean off his base, the city and parish decided not to put it back up. (The platform still stands; white flags encircled the bottom when I visited in late June.)

While some residents say the decision to let the soldier die with the hurricane indicates a more tolerant, diverse Lake Charles, the incident demonstrates a more rueful reality: that the deep racial tensions and injustices baked into the city are at once overpowered and heightened by nature’s onslaught.

Lake Charles is nearly 50 percent Black, 50 percent white, but that doesn’t mean it’s integrated. The city’s historic preservation district is a leafy neighborhood made up of mansions, yawning porches, and manicured lawns. It is bordered by North Lake Charles, which has some of the poorest census tracts in the country, and is primarily Black. Walking from one to the other takes just a few minutes. On one side of Broad Street, a main thoroughfare, there are towering mansions; on the other, toward the highway and railway tracks, smaller, shotgun-style homes.

On the north side of Louisiana Avenue, a Catholic school’s roof has been peeled back, exposing its naked gymnasium. A few blocks further north, a home’s face has been ripped off, intimately displaying the structures of daily life: built-in shelves, a spacious living room, and a desk in a small bedroom.

Mark Tizano, the city’s director of community development, observes that, in the wealthier parts of Lake Charles, “if you go down a street that’s ten blocks long, you may see 8 to 12 contractors at work. When you move into the more vulnerable locations in the city, you may go down a street that’s ten blocks long and not see one contractor … It’s just the typical situation [where] the most vulnerable populations are the ones to suffer the most.”

The city’s downtown, a mark of pride for the mayor, skirts the Charpentier Historic

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District and notably caters to higher-income clientele. There’s a bespoke shop that sells $130 hats and offers $70 haircuts, a juice joint selling $12 organic smoothies, a few restaurants offering a mix of Louisiana favorites—po’boys, crawfish, beignets—alongside hipper California fare like vegetarian pasta and bean burgers. It’s all Instagram-worthy, with hanging plants and minimalist design.

But there’s almost no one here to buy anything, or for that matter to work at the stores, giving the strip the uncomfortable personality of a middle schooler, all dressed up but unsure what to do. Because losing people means losing a workforce, help wanted signs hang everywhere. In the month after Hurricane Laura, the parish’s unemployment rate jumped from 8.7 to 12.7 percent, according to Daniel Groft, a lanky economist with salt-and-pepper hair who directs the H.C. Drew Center for Business and Economic Analysis at McNeese State University, which saw about 50 buildings damaged during the storms. The rate has now leveled back down to about 7.1 percent, Groft says, not necessarily because the economy is healthier, but because so many people have left.

City and parish officials say the city is at a tipping point as the one-year anniversary of Laura looms. Most insurance will only pay for temporary housing for a year—a time period that doesn’t restart with a new disaster—and much FEMA housing, for those lucky enough to get it, only lasts 18 months. “The longer and longer we wait for this disaster allocation” from the federal government, “the more and more folks are going to lose homes,” says Calcasieu Parish’s Alberto Galan. “We’re gonna lose neighborhoods, because [people] simply can’t wait anymore.”

At Investors’ Day, local officials talked through a variety of mix-and-match options, such as Section 8 vouchers being used on an individual or project level, with gaps filled by supplemental disaster aid.

But without knowing if that money will come and when, everything is on pause. The city and parish don’t have a clear vision for what housing would go where, or for whom.

Mayor Hunter says all options should be on the table—high-rise, mixed-income housing in the already-developed core, suburban single-family homes in more elevated areas,

Because losing people means losing a workforce, help wanted signs hang everywhere.

all smart development, guided by updated, storm-ready codes.

Not everyone was convinced. At the end of a session on long-term rebuilding, one developer leaned over to me to say that even with federal incentives, houses were likely just to be too expensive to build here, given the need for strong roofs and raised foundations. At lunch—tender chicken breast followed by a strawberry-topped cheesecake—another attendee questioned whether investing in Lake Charles housing really made sense, since returns take 15 to 20 years but most stock would be used by workers in short-term petrochemical jobs.

After a year of anguish, even those who can afford to stay are wondering whether that’s wise. “I think everyone in this town has thought about moving, honestly,” says Jennifer Cobian, the Calcasieu Parish Police Jury staff member responsible for the Greinwich Terrace buyout. She understood the magnitude of what she was dealing with after Laura, when she found a 100-pound terracotta planter she’d left on her porch in her neighbor’s yard. Her patio, ripped off the front of her house, has never been seen again.

“I mean, it was huge, like 30 feet by 15 feet.

And we have no idea where that patio is.”

She offered an exasperated chuckle as she reflected on the damage. “Me and my husband have had the conversation, like, what are we doing? It’s starting to not make a lot of sense. And we already compete to keep people here. You know, we have Houston two hours away. You see the writing on the wall.”

WHILE THE MAYOR is busy advocating for

relief aid and courting developers, city staff

are contacting the owners of vacant properties, telling them to either fix their home, or “we’re gonna come in here and condemn it and tear it down,” says city administrator John Cardone. “It’s been almost a year and it’s time to get those areas cleaned up.”

Residents locked in insurance battles can ask for more time, but ultimately, Cardone says, the properties pose a public-health and safety threat and make the city, in the midst of its rebirth, unattractive.

In poorer neighborhoods like North Lake Charles, people are being offered “pennies for their property” by private developers, according to Roishetta Ozane, a local community activist. (Across the city, “we buy houses cheap” signs are common.) She and Dominique Darbonne co-run the Vessel Project of Louisiana, a multiracial mutual aid organization formed during February’s freak winter storm. They helped unhoused and underhoused residents who had been turned away by the city and other organizations find hotel rooms for the night.

Two days after the Golden Nugget event, Ozane and Darbonne chop cabbage, onions, and sausage to the smell of freshly baking cornbread in the kitchen of St. Andrew Pres-

DAVID J. PHILLIP / AP PHOTO

The Capital One Tower, one of Lake Charles’s tallest buildings, remains significantly damaged from the spate of storms in 2020.

byterian Church. Ozane is tall, broad, with a warm, calm energy and a clean, efficient ponytail. Darbonne is short, muscular, and wiry, her long curly hair pulled back into a baseball cap. Together with a few volunteers, they make 150 hot meals for low-income residents on the weekends, since other meal programs only run Monday to Friday. Gapfilling is at the heart of what they do.

During the winter freeze, Ozane realized that people had “so many more needs that were not being met by the larger organizations because of bureaucracy and red tape.” The team recently paid for a baby’s funeral when the mother, homeless after the storms, couldn’t make the bill. They helped to get Felicia Collins, a volunteer with the Vessel Project, into a FEMA mobile home, after she paid $5,000 out of pocket to stay in a hotel after her insurance denied her claims. Darbonne says that a FEMA staff member praised them for helping Collins navigate the process. “And I was like, that’s fine, but isn’t that your job?” She says the Vessel Project “deals with the aftermath of what happens in the rooms” of politicians and policymakers.

Both Ozane and Darbonne have their own

housing struggles. After nearly a year living in a damaged house with her five kids, Ozane recently received temporary FEMA housing.

With her husband and two kids, Darbonne bounces between her parents and her brother’s homes as her own house is fixed.

Over a pile of vegetables, Darbonne expresses incredulity at events like Investors’ Day. “So, were there just a lot of slumlords there?” she asks, eyebrows raised. The two activists are particularly skeptical of the $1.2 billion Greinwich Terrace buyout. They don’t think the money, even if it is above market rate, will really help residents start over, with housing prices rising in Lake Charles and even higher across the country.

The history and legacy of an African American community is at stake. Ozane looks to nearby Mossville as a warning. The community, just a few miles down the road, was bought out by Sasol, a petrochemical company, nearly a decade ago. A few people have remained, but for the most part, “there’s nothing there,” she says. “People have forgotten about that community.”

Debra Ramirez is a former Mossville resident who now lives in Lake Charles. She also sees the Greinwich Terrace buyout as part of an effort to move poor people of color out of the way when they become inconvenient. She and her friends Paul Geary and Lois Booker Malvo, a triad of older residents who meet regularly to discuss race, public services, politics, and environmental contamination, say they’ve seen this pattern before. Lois grew up in the Fisherville neighborhood of North Lake Charles. She remembers chemicals spilling from the cars passing on the nearby train tracks, degrading the value of the 80-acre farm her grandfather had acquired after the Emancipation Proclamation. She’s worried that eventually, industry, which for decades has been encroaching on neighborhoods like Fisherville, will completely take over.

Darbonne wants the language of “build back better” to extend to Greinwich Terrace. She asks why the city and parish don’t take the $30 million slotted for the neighborhood to replace the current pump stations and “fix the problem.” Ozane shares the skepticism of many of the Terrace’s residents about the city’s claims. “When those

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 19

people moved into those homes 30, 40 years ago, they moved in there on a promise that it would never flood,” she says. “So why is it now that it’s flooding at every drop of rain?

Something happened.”

GREINWICH TERRACE resident Anita La-

20 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

Anita LaFleur of Greinwich Terrace has seen her house flood multiple times, but still doesn’t want to leave her home.

neighborhood, since FEMA considers the area “low-risk” for flooding. Still, LaFleur is shell-shocked. Her few remaining possessions are piled in her living room, accompanied by some clothes in the closets and a few family photos framed on the wall.

“Every time it rains hard, like yesterday, I’m like, oh gosh, I’m starting to pick stuff up.”

Like Darbonne, LaFleur doesn’t understand why the city and parish don’t just fix the flooding problem—build walls, put in a pump, find a way to divert the water. After Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, the parish promised residents they’d look into another pump, but nothing happened. LaFleur heard rumors that the city didn’t turn on the pumps fast enough during this year’s storms. She thinks “they didn’t want it to flow into other areas of the town, to the bigger houses.”

Complaints about f looding cut across racial and class lines in Lake Charles, whose drainage system dates back decades. Even in relatively wealthy downtown, streets fill up with water after a light rain. Part of the problem stems from a political and environmental collision. From above, Southwest Louisiana resembles a marbled countertop, one streak of water running into the other. But administratively, the landscape is cut into sharply defined jurisdictions that don’t take into account an interdependent ecosystem.

Which leads to finger-pointing. While the city is responsible for maintaining open ditches and making sure culverts and gutter lines are clean, the lakes and bayous that the water flows to are overseen by the parish and the drainage district, not to mention

MAR A K ARDAS-NELSON

Fleur, 64, grew up with most of her neighbors, who are older and low-income like her.

She works three jobs to pay off her mortgage and car payments: manning a gift shop in the Golden Nugget, cleaning a local doctor’s office, and doing hair in a salon tucked into the back of her home.

When I tell her that I’m checking in with residents to see how Lake Charles is doing, she waves around her gutted house and replies, “Terrible.”

Yet the thought of leaving is more abhorrent. “I put 12 years into this home,” LaFleur says, and she likes the quiet, friendly neighborhood. Her two sisters live down the road, one in the house that LaFleur grew up in. Even if she got the maximum buyout—$250,000, which the parish’s Alberto Galan calls “generous,” equal to the average price of a new home in Lake Charles as of 2019—she would consider the offer unworkable.

“I have a mortgage, so the broker would have to be paid off,” she explains. “So, after the fees and paying him what’s going to be for me?” Besides, she doesn’t know where she’d move. “Do you all have an area where we can move or subdivision for all of us who are bought out? Y’all don’t have anything, no answers for us, but y’all want us to buy out?”

It’s not that LaFleur wants to deal with more f looding. After fighting with her insurance company and receiving some money from FEMA, she started paying out of pocket to get her house fixed up after the hurricanes. By the spring, the cabinets were back in, the mold removed. Then the May 17 flood hit, and water spilled over the sides of the Kayouche Coulee and into her backyard.

By the time she left the house, water was up to her ankles. It ruined the mattresses, ruined the couches, ruined the AC, ruined storage bags, everything that was waiting to be unpacked.

Luckily, she had bought flood insurance in January, making her an exception in the

the water beneath roadways, which is the responsibility of the state. Even if the city cleans everything constantly, “if our water can’t get into the laterals (culverts) and the laterals can’t get into the bayous and the lake, you’re going to have backage. It’s just the way it works,” says John Cardone, the city administrator.

Jennifer Cobian understands residents’ concerns, but says that to save any parts of the Terrace, the oldest, lowest houses abutting Kayouche Coulee probably have to go, relinquishing the land to green space to absorb the extra rain. To protect future development, a new drainage ordinance requires larger subdivisions to have “zero runoff,” which limits how much new water can be pumped into local waterways. The city council also recently approved borrowing $20 million just for drainage projects.

By matching that with state and federal funding, Lake Charles hopes to spend $100 million on drainage in the coming years.

But Alberto Galan says that won’t protect the Terrace. “We’re seeing record-level rainfalls that we’ve never seen before,” he says. “We need to not see that as an isolated event, but expect that it may continue. The drainage system is not designed to withstand that.” Raising homes is an option, but it’s not seen as financially feasible. “There is not enough drainage that our entire budget could cover what would be needed to keep them from flooding,” says Galan.

Local officials say they’re willing to negotiate with homeowners, and stress that the buyout is voluntary. LaFleur takes issue with that word. “I mean, if they’re not going to fix the drainage, it’s almost like they’re forcing

Even in relatively wealthy downtown, streets fill up with water after a light rain.

you out,” she says. For now, she’s discussing with her sisters what to do. Even if she were to go forward with the buyout, it would take at least a year, and while she’s deciding, she’s not sure if she should fix the house because it could be flooded again anytime. “Either way you go,” she says, “you’re not winning.”

In between delivering meals and helping with housing, Roishetta Ozane, the community activist, reminds people that petrochemicals are as great a threat to the people of Lake Charles as the hurricanes. Some of her family members work at local plants, so she’s sensitive to concerns about jobs. Still, she peppers people with questions. “Do you know what fracking is? Do you like to fish?

Do you like to crab? Do you understand how important our wetlands are? Do you know that if these facilities continue to come you won’t be able to do that?”

Joe Biden’s focus on a just transition away from fossil fuels gives Ozane some hope. “The conversations need to happen now when you have a president who has promised to exchange those jobs with environmentally safe jobs,” she says. “We don’t want these natural disasters to get bigger and bigger with climate change and wipe us out.”

Ozane is determined to stay in Lake Charles, despite the hurricanes and the floods, the blue roofs and the empty downtown. “I live here, my children are here, my children will grow up here and I don’t want my grandchildren not being able to live in the same community that their parents lived in,” she says.

But Paul Geary, one of the triad of elders who talk politics and environmentalism every week, has been in the city too long to be that optimistic. Over the decades, he’s seen chemical plants and highways encroach, his friends and family affected by respiratory illness and cancer. For him, the future is clear. One day, in the not-toodistant future, the water will take over, and Lake Charles will be left to the alligators and the herons and irises and the few people who can make it there.

ON MY LAST DAY in Lake Charles, I drove

over the I-10 bridge from Lake Charles to neighboring Westlake, past the huge Cono-

coPhillips sign that welcomes visitors, past po’boy shops and BBQ trucks and drivethroughs selling daiquiris, with music from nearby Lafayette playing on the radio. I decided to kayak through the bayous, paddling past huge, orchid-like white flowers with their heads dipping down, turtles sunning themselves on spindly logs, finding shade under moss that nearly kissed the water. It felt timeless, unbending.

Louisiana is beloved for so many human things—zydeco, deep-fried alligator, syrupy cocktails, unmatched flair—that it’s easy to forget that the state is what it is because of the water. The bayous underpin the license plate slogan “Sportsman’s Paradise,” while also acting as floating highways on which chemicals and plastic, oil and gas, are shipped across the state and to the world.

For decades, Southwest Louisiana has been turned into one of America’s chief sacrifice zones, to the detriment of everything that lives there. As a country, we’ve decided that this is acceptable, on top of and compounding a longer history of sacrificing some bodies for the benefit of others.

Maybe Paul is right. Maybe now we’re at a strange sort of tipping point, where that sacrifice will no longer be possible because we won’t have the land on which to make our plastics and ship our natural gas. But that’s a different sort of sacrifice, one that’s not so far from the argument being made about Greinwich Terrace: We screwed up, but we’ve got to find a place to put that rising water so that the rest of us can stay afloat.

But across the city, when I asked what made Lake Charles tick, I got the same answer: the people, with their unbending kindness and fortitude, the embedded resilience birthed from the formerly enslaved people who found in Lake Charles a place to elude their captors and from the Cajuns who fled Canada to make Southwest Louisiana home. If the water comes, we risk losing that history, as Mossville was lost, as people fear Greinwich Terrace will be. The water will persist, but at what a huge, immeasurable cost. n Mara Kardas-Nelson is a freelance journalist reporting on health, the environment, international development, and inequality.

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 21

22 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

Anatomy of an

AntiUnion Meeting M

ike Woliansky began to speak, in a practiced, rehearsed fashion that most resembled the closing argument from a prosecutor. Woliansky is the CEO of No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company that brands itself as strongly left-wing. Its product names include the vegan chicken “Comrade Cluck” and vegan chorizo “El Zapatista,” though when advocates of the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas got wind of that name, they were furious, and the company changed it to “El Capitan.”

But on this day, February 11, 2020, at the

company’s production plant in Weaverville, North Carolina, Woliansky wasn’t talking about the importance of veganism for climate protection, or the need to seize the means of production.

He was talking about quarterly earnings.

“We are nowhere near close to being profitable yet,” Woliansky said, pointing to a chart. He explained that while demand for plant-based foods had soared, and while No Evil products had jumped from 1,400 to 5,500 stores in a little over a year, “it takes a lot of money to launch and grow a business … and at this point that money doesn’t come from sales, it comes from investors

How No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company, squashed a union drive

By David Dayen Illustrations by Wesley Bedrosian

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 23

who believe in our product.” The balance sheet showed consistent projected losses at about $200,000 a month. That was the plan, to spend what was necessary to build scale. The only thing that could get in the way, he explained to the workforce at the mandatory meeting, was if they voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).

“It’s a very real risk that having a union at No Evil Foods will greatly impact our ability to continue raising capital,” Woliansky intoned, the self-described leftist singing off the song sheet of cold-eyed capitalism. “I had one of our current investors say this week, ‘I’ve seen hundreds of companies come across my desk, and I have never seen an investment in a unionized startup … if I was looking at this business for the first time, I would run the other way.’”

It was a devilishly clever closing argument for what was a brutal, coordinated campaign against the union drive. Woliansky’s hands were clean; the threat didn’t come from management, but from the investors. They would bring down the company if workers tried to assert their collective rights. “Please understand that I have no control over what investors will do,” Woliansky stressed. He said that unionization would be seen by investors as a “vote of no confidence” in leadership. He could be deposed, with a new CEO brought in “to run this business in a very different way.” Investors might simply pull their money, or they would demand that management re-evaluate pay, benefits, health coverage, everything. Workers could lose what little they had.

“If you’re still thinking about voting to bring the UFCW to No Evil Foods, I’m asking you to step back, give us a chance to be successful by voting no,” Woliansky concluded. “You can always bring the union back in a year for another vote. But you’ll never know what we could have done and achieved together if you do it now.”

The room erupted in applause.

24 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

Former workers at No Evil Foods have described this as the “scorched earth speech.” Given two days before the election, they said it altered the dynamic from one where pro-union leaders thought they had a good shot to win, to one where it became pretty clear they would lose. “That was the biggest turning point of the whole thing,” said Jon Reynolds, a production worker and one of the key organizers. “Any people on the fence were hopping off. It was like a slow-motion car crash.”

Two days later, workers would vote 43-15 against going union.

T

he speech was the last and perhaps the most nakedly direct of a series of captive-audience meetings held for No Evil Foods employees in the run-up to the union vote. Across America, meetings like this have been routine for decades; union organizers are excluded, of course, but employees are required to attend. They’re part of the playbook that union-busting consultants hand to companies looking to fight collective-bargaining efforts. No Evil Foods had the assistance of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, a management-

side labor law firm that runs union avoidance campaigns.

(The day of the election, one of Constangy’s lawyers, Leigh Tyson, was walking around the vegan meat facility with a leather handbag, two workers told me.)

They may be routine, but it’s hard to truly gauge just what goes on inside these private meetings. We can imagine the arguments made about union corruption, threats to businesses, and the uncertain relationship between workers and management. But it’s quite different to actually hear bosses go on for hours, day after day, about the scourge of unions.

The cumulative nature of the messaging can only be weighed if you hear it.

And thanks to workers at No Evil Foods, we can.

Snippets of audio of the anti-union meetings have floated around in left media circles since the demise of the union drive. Vice, Jacobin, The Appeal, and the Dixieland of the Proletariat podcast have reported on them.

Video of one entire meeting was put on the internet. No Evil Foods waged an aggressive campaign to get any recordings scrubbed, including filing takedown requests claiming that the company held a copyright on the speeches made, and even impersonating a former employee at the plant in making some of those requests. They failed, because North Carolina is a one-party consent state, making the recordings legal, and making reporting on them fair use.

The Prospect has exclusively obtained over five hours of recordings of nearly all the meetings held for workers at the plant in January and February 2020. In total, they paint an important picture of how companies, armed with that union-busting playbook, commit psychological warfare on their employees to turn them against collective bargaining.

Under the guise of voter education, unions were depicted as corrupt, money-grubbing businesses that would neglect workers and

tear companies apart. Workers were told that their bid for collective bargaining could lead to cuts to pay and benefits; that they could be dragged before kangaroo courts and fined heavily for breaking union rules; that at a company like No Evil Foods, they would usher in a culture starkly at odds with progressive values and social justice. Most of all, employees were told that the union would upend a successful startup business, and get in the way of the team spirit and mutual trust that made No Evil Foods great.

That last argument is what all the other arguments funnel into, a narrative honed over decades.

“The actual message is that there are not two parties to labor relations, bosses and workers,” said Bob Muehlenkamp, a former organizing director for SEIU 1199 and the Teamsters, and author of the introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Confessions of a Union Buster, the 1993 Martin Jay Levitt autobiography. “There’s the employer and the employees and they’re the happy family. And something called the union, which is the outside, carnivorous, voracious, communist, violent third party … We’re here together and there’s this thing coming from the outside to divide us.”

There’s a reason these meetings aren’t broadcast, and a reason why No Evil Foods wanted them suppressed. At a time when workers attempting to unionize are under constant pressure—see the tactics used in the campaign to organize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama—union adversaries would rather keep their secrets under wraps. But it’s worth demystifying their methods, in the interest of, as any manager speaking at an anti-union meeting would tell you, keeping workers fully informed.

“Unions Are Big Business” “We’re investing in your education about unions because we believe that it’s important to your future,” said Sadrah Schadel, one of No Evil Foods’ two co-founders, in her speech (she was one of four management-lev-

el speakers in the recordings; the others were co-founder and CEO Mike Woliansky, plant manager Becky Heinen, and vice president of engineering Mark McPeak). The meetings were pitched as information sessions, and speakers stressed repeatedly that, because unionization is such a big financial decision for workers and their families, the company was taking the time to make them knowledgeable voters. And workers did need more knowledge; there was little understanding of what unions were all about among the staff, according to workers I talked to.

Critical to management’s strategy was preempting any thoughts that No Evil Foods was peddling anti-union propaganda. McPeak repeatedly interrupted himself to say that everything being presented came from public sources, like the National Labor Relations Board website, the UFCW constitution, and the North Carolina Local 1208 bylaws, handbooks, tax filings, and news reports. “If you don’t believe me that’s fine,” McPeak says at one point. “I’ve got kids, they don’t believe anything I say … [but] it’s in here, it’s all in here.”

Furthering the pose of objectivity, management would occasionally point out the good in unions. McPeak noted several times

that he was previously in the Teamsters, and that unions “make sense” for some companies. Schadel said unions “ helped workers whose voices have been ignored by corporate giants.” But those moments were rare. The predominant assessment about unions was unequivocal. “Just like No Evil, it’s a business,” McPeak said. “Call it this, call it that, it’s a business, period … They’re in the business of negotiating labor contracts.”

Becky Heinen spent much of her speech running through the UFCW’s 2019 tax statement. She highlighted the $222 million brought in from dues paid by its 1.2 million members. That’s the union’s main revenue source, and to No Evil Foods managers, all that the union cares about. A lot of stress was placed on how hard it is to get out of paying dues. At one point, McPeak rattled off a series of unfair labor practices filed against the union over a number of years, repeating several times that “they won’t let them resign or stop paying dues.” Heinen compared dues to “a shitty gym membership you want to get out of; the stipulations on it are insane.”

(When called on this by Meagan Sullivan, a pro-union employee who often spoke up to rebut management statements, Heinen said the comparison was merely to a passive deducted payment like a subscription.)

Heinen then ticked off where the UFCW’s money went. She described high salaries (the president of the international makes $341,000 a year, not even on the charts compared to a corporate CEO), generous benefits, and perks. She mentioned a $1 million “party” at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, and $220,000 to hire travel agents. (These combined are less than one-half of 1 percent of dues revenue.) She claimed that $120 million directed to officer salaries, buildings, overhead, political advertising, and lobbying was “not spent on the members or getting the things that they need.” And litigation was highlighted: “They did illegal things on labor

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 25

laws, and union dues are their source of money, so y’all going to be the ones paying for things on their lawsuits,” Heinen said.

With all this talk of dues, only rarely did a couple of salient facts slip out. First of all, in the rightto-work state of North Carolina, workers can opt out of dues-paying. (Management even painted this as a bad thing, because those workers would have no say in the election of a union representative or a final contract.) Plus, it’s rarely mentioned how much No Evil Foods employees would actually pay in dues, which considering how much emphasis is put on dues, you’d think would be a primary preoccupation.

In his “scorched ear th” speech, Woliansky brief ly talked about the union leaders “collecting $500 a year in dues,” which is the approximate average for Local 1208, the North Carolina UFCW affiliate.

Once, Schadel made the mistake of breaking that down in terms of the weekly paycheck: ten dollars. And dues across all UFCW locals are less than half that, which is the weekly equivalent of the discounted cost of one package of No Evil Foods’ “The Stallion” plant-based Italian sausage. But because the low level of dues was inadvertently mentioned just once, and the concept of siphoning dues from workers was foregrounded, an impression was made.

“You Give Up Your Voice” Management emphasized over and over that if employees chose the union, it would become their “exclusive bargaining agent” for all terms and conditions of employment.

They framed this as workers giving up their individual rights to speak with managers.

Even the union steward, who would be a fellow worker elected by the employees, wasn’t talked about as if they were a fellow employee. “Whoever you select … is the only person in the unit that can negotiate on your behalf,” McPeak said. “Somebody says, ‘Oh, I want to talk to you.’ Nope, can’t do it, gotta go through this person.”

26 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

This is part and parcel of the idea that the union is a scary interloper that would break up the glorious worker/management relationship. “I don’t want to sit across a table from you. I want you all next to me,” said Schadel during her speech. “I don’t want your individual voices to be silenced.”

Asserting collective-bargaining rights, in management’s description, would constitute a reduction of overall rights at work.

This narrative continued in management’s discussion of the grievance process, a masterstroke of anti-union doublespeak.

Heinen pointed out that stewards have “total discretion” to decide what grievances to pursue on behalf of workers, whether for wrongful termination or unfair disciplinary action or other slights. The labor contract would likely have a formal grievance and arbitration process, but “no real legal obligation to help you if you have a problem,” Schadel said.

Schadel and McPeak both read off a litany of what they presented as 6,500 unfair labor practice cases against the UFCW, where workers claimed violations of the union’s duty of fair representation. Notably, managers gave no insight into the nature of the cases or how they turned out at the NLRB. “You can go look it up and find out

what happened to this, if you have interest in it,” McPeak said about one charge. “I’m not sure how these cases turned out,” Schadel said about two others. But if you are to believe the narrative, the mere existence of complaints against the UFCW demonstrates its overriding failure to represent its membership.

But in select moments, management gave the exact opposite impression: that the union would zealously protect and defend the worst possible members. They relayed lurid, mostly hypothetical tales of unions fighting to keep sexual harassers and stalkers on the job, even forcing them to work side by side with their victims.

Heinen said this happened to a friend of hers at a unionized workplace, although the union in question wasn’t identified as part of UFCW. This was expressed as just part of the directive of the union, to advocate on behalf of their members. But most of the time, management was stressing that the union would not advocate on behalf of their members.

Schadel tried to pull off the feat of expressing both ideas at the same time. “I’m horrified at the thought that a union that’s supposed to represent all of you including anyone who is subject to harassment might fight to put that person back to work,” she stated. Then pivoted. “And maybe they wouldn’t. I mean they do have the right not to process a grievance. And they definitely have a history of abandoning cases against their members’ wishes.” She took a stab at squaring the circle by suggesting that the harasser may be the union steward, or the victim a vocal opponent of the union. But she wouldn’t be pinned down on one side or the other; the union either is negligent in protecting wronged workers, or passionate in defending sleazebags, or both, or neither.

Despite the logical faults, you could see how it worked. If you view yourself as an upstanding employee, the picture of the union given is that either you won’t get the

help you need, or someone who doesn’t deserve the help will.

Which just raises doubts about the advantages of unionization.

“Everything Starts at Zero” It is entirely true that nothing is guaranteed in collective bargaining; the union only wins the right to ask for certain terms. But the way No Evil Foods managers presented that fact was clearly designed to play on worker fears.

The only rules governing a contract bargaining session, as management reminded workers several times, are that the parties operate in good faith and in a reasonable time frame. All of the details regarding employment—pay, benefits, vacation, worker conditions and complaints, and so on—would be “unknown and uncertain,” as Woliansky put it. McPeak was even more stark: “The fact that you have a union agreement doesn’t mean there’s more money” at the company for wages.

Key to this discussion was the fact that No Evil Foods paid $13.65 an hour on average at the time of the union vote, more than a living wage for the region, which includes the college town of Asheville. The company had even recently offered health benefits.

Several employees, even pro-union ones, remarked at the meetings that they were making more than they ever had before. The company also added a “shift differential,” increasing pay for those on the night shift working irregular hours.

The contention from pro-union forces was that they just wanted to lock good pay and benefits into a contract, giving them the security that it cannot be taken away. That drew the counterattack from management.

“It starts at zero,” McPeak said of the bargaining process. Everything would be renegotiated. If there was an impasse, Schadel explained, management could implement their last, best, and final offer, and institute pay or benefit cuts unilaterally. When asked whether it was mandatory to negotiate all employment terms from scratch, McPeak answered wryly, “No, but it’s smart business.”

No Evil Foods couldn’t even confirm who would be sitting at the bargaining table. It could be the CEO or it could be the investors, as Woliansky pointed out in his “scorched earth” speech, who’d be re-evaluating everything. Examples of pay cuts and concessions that unions had made—most of them from the period of the Great Recession when businesses were desperate to avoid closing— were peppered into the speeches, as well as cases of unionized businesses failing and shutting down. Woliansky described the potential outcomes of bargaining: “Could be less, could be more, could be the same.”

By law, management is not allowed to say that workers will lose pay or benefits if they vote to join a union. But they can say that the outcome is unknown. And any worker with some memory of precarity in their heads will immediately make the connection: They could lose what they have. And if they didn’t like it, No Evil Foods would find workers who’d accept those terms. “Do you think people in Asheville would be willing to work for less than what we pay?” Woliansky asked at one point.

Bargaining units were not even guaranteed to win a first contract, Schadel declared, using 2009 data from the Eco-

nomic Policy Institute. Even more than three years after winning a union election, 25 percent of bargaining units fail to win a first contract, EPI reported. Then again, non-union workplaces get contracts governing their employment zero percent of the time.

Of course, unions do have tools that may get what they want, most prominently the strike. No Evil managers didn’t shy away from arguing that strikes are effective at crippling businesses and forcing changes, but they naturally focused on the economic costs to the workers. It is certainly true that UFCW offers a meager strike fund of $100 a week for full-time employees, and only then after 14 days on the picket lines. (In a recent labor action at Stop & Shop grocery stores in New England, Schadel said, UFCW paid nothing because the action lasted only 11 days.) Schadel layered on top of that the fact that workers would not get health insurance premiums paid, would not be eligible for unemployment insurance in North Carolina, and could even be permanently replaced if they walk out.

In fact, fewer than 1 percent of UFCW bargaining efforts evolve into strikes, because both businesses and workers have large incentives to avoid them. But the worstcase scenarios are the main ones presented at anti-union meetings.

“They’re Going to Come After You” Mark McPeak devoted an entire session to a small subsection of the UFCW constitution. Perhaps deliberately, he chose the most confusing legalese in the document to illustrate his point, with a smattering of lawyer jokes along the way. (“It was written by a bunch of lawyers, so it’s got to be really easy to understand.”)

The rule in question was about how the union can discipline members for “violating duties and obligations,” and the vagueness

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 27

of the duties and obligations that could draw such an action.

McPeak homed in on the proviso that former members who were previously part of a union local could be brought up on charges. “These charges can be brought by peers,” McPeak said, his voice rising. “So if somebody didn’t like you … you can still be charged, and they can go after you financially, after you leave.”

McPeak explained that those charged would be “put on trial” before the local executive board, with the ability to gain assistance only from another member of the union (“You can’t even do what the American justice system allows you to do, which is have a lawyer”), and if found guilty by two-thirds of the board, be assessed fines. “So you’re going on trial,” McPeak concluded. “They can get you up with a financial penalty through this trial. It’s a lot like a real trial, except you don’t get a lawyer … you’re going to be charged for something.”

He kept emphasizing the word “shall” in the legal document, as evidence that you, the person in that room, will definitively be brought up on charges at some point. (“Shall” refers, of course, to what must happen during the hypothetical process.)

Coming out of McPeak’s mouth, the process sounded like something out of Kafka.

But missing from the hysteria is any indication of whether members or ex-members are routinely brought up on charges for violating the constitution or its bylaws. The only real example that McPeak managed to find were cases involving “scabs,” workers who cross picket lines. “If you’re providing for your family,” McPeak said, “they’ll come after you because you’re in violation of the bylaws. If you stay out, your family doesn’t eat.”

McPeak supplied one letter from a union local warning members that they would be retaliated and discriminated against if they crossed a picket line (the letter was a response to the employer’s claim that changing their union status would allow

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them to do so), and one case of a worker in western Massachusetts who had crossed a picket line in the Stop & Shop strike, was subjected to harassment (including unacceptable homophobic slurs), and eventually brought up on charges by the union.

This led to a remarkable exchange. Meagan Sullivan asked McPeak, “What was the result of that with the guy?”

“I have no idea,” McPeak replied, alluding to the fact that the scab filed an NLRB claim against the union. “You can go on the NLRB website and go make yourself happy and look these things up.”

“I did actually,” Sullivan said. “The guy received a settlement, and got all his dues paid back, and now they have posters all around their workplaces at Stop & Shop saying that you don’t have to continue, that you are able to cross picket lines, that you won’t lose your job as a result.”

McPeak: “Well if you knew the ruling, why’d you ask me the question?”

Sullivan: “Because you’re not telling us.”

McPeak, now wounded: “Why are you being hostile?”

“Information From Both Sides” McPeak’s one-sided retelling of this event

typified the stories management told in the meetings.

Despite claiming to put out information “from both sides,” routinely managers would relay the most damning tales about union malfeasance, without discussing the outcome. “Every single case that you guys have cited has been resolved,” Sullivan said at one point in a meeting.

That included not just the case at Stop & Shop. Management brought up a situation involving sexual misconduct claims against Mickey Kasparian, president of a UFCW local in San Diego; Kasparian was voted out by the local membership in 2018. There was talk of the embezzlement of nearly $300,000 by a former union president and secretarytreasurer at the local that No Evil Foods workers would be signing up for, Local 1208.

The local’s members complained about it in 2014, the international union investigated and uncovered the thievery, and both parties pleaded guilty and were sentenced in federal court. Schadel even brought up cases of sexual harassment at the New York City Ballet and a Ford plant in Chicago, which had nothing to do with the UFCW. A back-and-forth argument would ensue habitually about these cases. Sullivan would point out the resolutions, which managers chose not to describe, and would then call them “stories of accountability,” where the system worked to root out misconduct.

Woliansky would then interject, whether he was leading the meeting or not, and say that actually, they were stories of corruption, and should give workers pause about entering an organization where this kind of conduct goes on. “If it were me and I heard that story about a company I was about to go work for, whether or not they held themselves internally accountable … I would still decide I don’t want to be a part of that organization,” he said once. Woliansky later reiterated the story, initially saying the Local 1208 leaders had been embezzling

for 40 years, then four years, then “several.” (It was three years.)

Union members have certainly made mistakes, engaged in despicable acts, and even committed crimes. In an organization as large as the UFCW, you are bound to find stories of impropriety if you go back far enough.

Even in a small company like No Evil Foods, managers said there had been episodes of harassment and discrimination, and asserted that they had swiftly terminated anyone confirmed to have been involved in such conduct.

The company wanted credit for holding bad actors accountable, while neglecting to mention when unions had done the same.

“These Are Not Our Values” No Evil Foods prides itself on its woke progressivism—the managers were types who would wear baseball caps and black hoodies to work, and throw out the words “fuck” and “shit” a lot. Whenever they could, managers tried to use that pose to demean the UFCW as out of step with their culture, claiming that the union “coopted the language of worker’s rights and socialism” for their own purposes.

Schadel referred to the “old white guys” at the top of the union, and how much money they made. Heinen compared union dues paying for “junkets” to Vegas to how “it bothers me that tax money is going for our president to play golf.” (At the time, the president was Donald Trump.) Schadel, who was adept at wielding this identity politics, responded to the argument about the union holding people internally accountable to how Harvey Weinstein was brought to justice, but “does that make him absolved from the fact that he did those things?”

The often-repeated incidents of sexual harassment and anti-LGBT comments were singled out for umbrage-taking. “This is the exact opposite of what we stand for and who we are,” Schadel said.

A popular argument involved referring to Local 1208 as those people from Tar Heel, home to the Smithfield Foods

plant, the largest pig processing plant in the world, which is unionized with UFCW. No Evil Foods is a vegan food company, and managers tried to play up the rivalry.

“I am an unapologetic vegan, I don’t trust a union that represents meat,” Heinen said at one meeting. Woliansky took it a step further, outlining a conspiracy theory that the union local would want to sabotage No Evil Foods. “If they keep us from being successful, all they do is create new opportunities for Smithfield and the 3,400 meatcutters in Tar Heel that they represent to put animal meat products into stores instead of our plant meat products,” he said. “I mean come on, these guys are our competitors.”

There was such a deliberate effort to build a dichotomy between No Evil Foods culture and union culture that Woliansky just blurted it out: “I think a lot of these points are being made to draw a contrast between the culture we are trying to build at No Evil Foods and the culture and atmosphere that sometimes is built around unions.”

“Just Trust Us” The closing argument throughout the meetings was that No Evil Foods was a great place to work, and that bringing in

the union would create an irreparable breach in the relationship between workers and bosses. The union was just not a “good fit” for a young company looking to grow; it would prohibit flexibility and add bureaucracy.

It would throw a company of equals into an “us versus them” posture. It would “force us to apply a one-sizefits-all approach to people we see as unique individuals,” as Schadel put it. It would leash a high-flying company in an emerging field to a dying union model; several managers noted how union membership was declining, as if that was a consequence of the unions themselves and not decades of employers using the deficiencies of labor law to make organizing nearly impossible.

The message was clear: No Evil Foods cared about its workers. It provided health benefits and extra pay for the night shift.

It fixed the concerns that initially animated the union drive. It made sacrifices that other startup companies wouldn’t to give back to the workforce. It hired people who’d been incarcerated and attempted to rehabilitate them. (Several workers told me managers seeded a rumor with these people that the union would drug-test employees, raising their anxiety.) And what the company was doing was working, with rising sales and excitement about the future. “I think the best thing I can say is it comes down to trust,” Woliansky said. “Sadrah and I really do have a vision for what we want to do here.” That vision could only be derailed by the union vote.

“They did a good job cultivating this team language that’s difficult to get over the hump,” says Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, who reviewed transcripts of the meetings. “And reading transcripts with swearing as part of the general conversation, like we’re hanging out and having a

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 29

good time. That’s going to be effective in creating a situation that’s cynically very paternalist … it’s very insidious and tremendously effective.”

Prior to the union drive, workers told me that they were friends with their colleagues, able to sit down and talk in a civil manner about just about anything. But the effectiveness of management’s campaign could be seen in the question-and-answer sessions held at the end of the meetings, which often devolved into shouting matches among the workers. By the end, pro-union voices were being told by their fellow employees to “go find another job,” and that “this is [Woliansky and Schadel’s] company … don’t try to be here and fuck up what they got.” This was more than just people expressing their opinions about their job and the company and the union; it got personal.

The infighting grew into a manifestation of how the union itself would toxify the pleasant workplace. The worker discussions served to prove the point management was making. “I swear these people got off on making those of us especially vocal about it,” said Meagan Sullivan. “They’d just push us and push us until we hit a breaking point, where we’re visibly upset. They painted us like we’re these emotionally unstable bullies. That was the goal, to cause tension between all of us.”

It’s part of management’s playbook, according to Muehlenkamp, the former Teamsters organizer. “You have to create this miserable workplace, and then you provide the relief at the end,” he said. “This is the psychological, physical, economic, manipulative system, and all the parts work together.”

The divide-and-conquer approach began right at the outset of the union effort the previous summer. Soon after it started, No Evil Foods shifted from a four-day, ten-hour schedule to five days a week. This led to about half the staff leaving, according to workers, including many who had signed union cards.

“It leads me to believe that maybe they had caught wind of the organizing push,” says Josh Coit, a former production assistant at the plant.

To fill that gap, the company

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hired a lot of new workers, who largely felt that things were going well and didn’t want to risk a union blowing that up. “I spent seven months trying to find a job,” said one worker. “Now I’ve got a job … a better-paying job than I ever thought I’d have … No Evil Foods has helped me change my life tremendously. And I think I trust the people who helped me get that far.”

O

n February 13 of last year, when the NLRB tallied the votes, the union effort fizzled.

A month later, the COVID pandemic led to lockdowns across the country. It was a disaster for restaurants and hotels and the hospitality industry, but a huge boost for food companies, as grocery stores were flooded with customers and Instacart shoppers.

The No Evil Foods facility was small; workers toiled in four smallish rooms, working in close proximity. Several were either immunocompromised or had family in that condition. Without a union contract, it was up to management to decide how to handle the pandemic and keep workers safe.

They offered workers three choices, which had to be made within 24 hours.

Option one, they could quit, with three weeks’ severance, and sign a nondisclosure agreement agreeing to not work in the food industry for a year, refrain from talking to the press, and absolve the company of any violation of the National Labor Relations Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the Family and Medical Leave Act. There would be no option for filing for unemployment insurance in the event of a resignation. Option two, they could quit, not sign the NDA, get no severance, and maybe come back later. Option three, they could stay, with a $1.50-anhour pay increase in the fall, but only if workers had perfect attendance for the next 90 days.

About 13 percent of the workforce took the buyout. Jon Reynolds and Meagan Sullivan circulated a petition, which a majority of the workers remaining signed, asking for “reconsideration regarding the ‘90 days of perfect attendance’ policy before we are able to receive hazard pay.”

Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers.

Reynolds started to get that old feeling back. “It was like there was solidarity in the workplace again,” he told me. “We were going to take the petition and march to the boss with the petition in hand.”

But the day before that was to happen, he was pulled off his shift and asked about the petition. Shortly thereafter, the company announced an immediate raise for production employees of $2.25 an hour, with no conditions. Reynolds wouldn’t be getting it. He was fired a few weeks later for “social distancing violations.” Another union organizer, Cortne Roche, was fired for violating the company’s dress code; she was told her pants were too short. Sullivan would voluntarily leave shortly thereafter, also feeling pressure that edged up to retaliation.

Reynolds and Roche took their case to the NLRB, and No Evil Foods agreed to a $40,000 settlement in October 2020.

The company didn’t have to admit fault— although during the anti-union meetings, just the existence of a complaint was enough for them to smear the UFCW—but it did have to post a flyer in the facility stating that workers had the legal right to organize without fear of retaliation.

That flyer didn’t stay up for long. On June 11, every remaining worker at the North Carolina facility lost their job. No Evil Foods announced it would outsource production of its foods to a separate manufacturer in Danville, Illinois, eliminating the need for the workforce. “In-house manufacturing with our own team was something we built, loved, and fought for

YOUTUBE

No Evil Foods CEO Mike Woliansky addresses workers at the company’s first anti-union meeting.

very hard,” Woliansky said in a statement.

“Ultimately, however, for a company of our size to survive in the hyper-competitive marketplace, the co-manufacturing model will be required going forward.” Discourse Blog reported that the co-manufacturer also makes meat products.

Workers were given no notice; the day they found out, at a staff meeting with a tearful Woliansky, was their last day on the job.

Nobody got a day of severance. Health benefits were immediately canceled. Woliansky claimed in the meeting that the company had run out of money and had to make this tough decision. But No Evil Foods wasn’t shutting down; it was just outsourcing its labor. Schadel, in her statement, made it sound like this was simply the evolution of the company: “With this next phase of No Evil Foods, we look forward to continuing to deliver delicious, sustainable foods to our customers that they can feel great about eating.”

The company did give workers an envelope on the way out; it included a form letter

of recommendation and a flyer for a job fair in Asheville.

“Screw all of y’all,” said one worker before leaving.

Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers. With a contract, they would have been able to negotiate over hazard pay and workplace conditions during the pandemic. They would have been warned 60 days in advance of any shuttering of the facility (small workplaces with under 100 employees, like No Evil Foods, are exempt from this legal requirement). They would have been able to work with the company to try to save their jobs.

Instead, taking on faith that the bosses would look out for them and take care of them, the workers ended up with nothing.

The theme of the anti-union meetings was that unionization was a risk, a roll of the dice, a threat to the status quo. But businesses are inherently fraught with danger.

The risk is always present, as workers at

No Evil Foods found out one year later.

But people are naturally protective of what they already have, and suspicious of the unknown. With unions so decimated as a percentage of the U.S. workforce (they represent just 6.3 percent of private-sector employees), it’s easy to paint a nefarious picture of them to the uninitiated, and then let human nature do the rest. “It’s really underrated how scary it is to vote yes,” Loomis said. “In the modern workplace it’s a brave act to vote for a union.”

The only way to reverse this is with strong labor laws that prevent the most egregious anti-union tactics, including captive-audience meetings of the kind we’ve quoted from in this article. Absent such laws, it will be very difficult to prevent the mass psychological experiment that management has enacted, with sophisticated precision, over the past 40 years. Whether at a meeting or on the shop floor, those tactics will continue. Workers looking to organize must be prepared for them. n

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 31

NINA TURNER IS

REACHING FORWARD ANDREACHING BACK DEMOCRATS MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THEY COULD LEARN A LOT FROM THE BERNIE SANDERS ALLY.

THE FIRST TIME I SAW Nina Turner speak was at the 2017 People’s Summit, a gathering of faithful Bernie Sanders supporters after his first presidential run, hosted by National Nurses United. It was well into the Trump presidency, and Turner was out to rouse the crowd to action.

RoseAnn DeMoro, then executive director of NNU, introduced her as the Sanders movement’s “spiritual leader.” She took the stage in a floor-length magenta dress and cat-eye glasses, and proceeded to rock the crowd like a combination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Iggy Pop. Halfway through her speech— punctuated, call-and-response-style, with the refrain “With these hands we will rise up”—she hopped off the stage and continued to speak while moving through the crowd,

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whipping them to a standing ovation, then dropping them to complete silence. Turner pointed out that when Black women like her speak out, “sometimes we are accused of being called angry.” She paused for emphasis. “This morning I am here to say to you my name is Nina Turner and I am an angry ass Black woman.” As the crowd roared its approval, she laughed and invited them to “be an angry Black woman” with her.

Toward the end of her speech, Turner turned to the crowd, grabbing the hands of two audience members and pulling them close to her. “We have two hands. One to reach forward and the other to reach back,” she said. It struck me then and now as a perfect explanation for what left-leaning elected officials, and particularly Turner

PATRICK SEMANSKY / AP PHOTO

BY SARAH JAFFE

Nina Turner introduces Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders during a campaign event, January 4, 2020, in Mason City, Iowa.

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 33

herself, are trying to do: reach forward to the movements on the ground, taking ideas from Black Lives Matter and economic and climate justice organizers, and reaching back to those who might not be on board yet, convincing them that a broad progressive movement has something to offer them too.

Now that she’s running for Congress, in the special election to fill Marcia Fudge’s vacant seat in Ohio’s 11th District, Turner is hoping to bring that work to Washington. The Democratic establishment hasn’t forgiven her for choosing Sanders over Hillary Clinton, and is lining up to try to defeat her. But if they could get over past slights, mainstream Democrats could see in Turner’s approach a path out of the stalemates and bickering that usually characterize their time in power.

Her willingness to learn from her base, while holding fast to principles and being willing to take a public stand even when that stand might cost her, offers a lesson to the party in how to evolve in the years to come.

IN MAY, I VISITED Turner in her campaign

office, finding that same charisma present in her public speeches and in one-on-one conversations, the same humor, the same intensity. The office was in the Cleveland neighborhood where she’d grown up, known as Lee-Harvard. She lived with her maternal grandparents and what she described as “a network of grandmamas” in the neighborhood, keeping an eye on her and the other kids. Her mother, a nurse’s aide, struggled to care for seven children and deal with her own health, and died at just 42. Turner credits her mother’s death for her devotion to Medicare for All as a policy, and her experience getting a series of jobs as a teenager to help the family stay afloat for her determination to raise wages for the nation’s working people.

Turner has been in public service in some fashion since 1997, when she took a job as a legislative aide to state Sen. Rhine McLin, then worked for the city of Cleveland’s school district. She won a seat on Cleveland’s city council in 2005 and then was appointed to replace a resigning state senator in 2008.

In the state Senate, she attracted national attention when, in protest against (male) legislators’ continuing attempts to restrict

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reproductive health care, she introduced a bill that would require men to jump through the same kind of hoops to get Viagra that women are required to in order to get an abortion. It would have mandated a cardiac stress test and proof from a recent partner that they are indeed experiencing erectile dysfunction. The audacity—and humor—of that bill were a hallmark of her style, and give an indication of the kind of fights she might pick on Capitol Hill.

As a sitting state senator and a rising star in Ohio’s Democratic Party, Turner ran for secretary of state in 2014, looking forward to the next presidential election in a key swing state, and back at the long history of denying Black people in particular access to the ballot. She lost that race and hasn’t run for office since. But when Fudge, who represents the district where Turner has spent most of her life, was chosen as secretary of housing and urban development, “this assignment chose me,” Turner said.

But Turner is known best outside of Ohio as one of Bernie Sanders’s earliest supporters. And while her local supporters speak approvingly of her time in office and her approachability on the campaign trail, she continues to be drawn back into the endless clamor rehashing the 2016 primary.

As the Vermont senator’s first Black endorser “of note,” she unwittingly stepped squarely into one of the more persistent— and persistently wrong—narratives of leftof-center politics in the past five years: that the politics of race and of class are somehow opposed, and that Sanders and the growing democratic socialist movement in the U.S. represent a mostly white base that wants to subordinate “identity politics” to the allencompassing mantle of class.

Before the 2016 presidential race began, Turner, then chair of engagement in the Ohio Democratic Party, had accepted an invitation to speak at a Ready for Hillary event. She had just come off her bruising secretary of state race, where she and every other statewide Democrat had lost, and, she said, “like a good Democrat,” she’d agreed to appear. She gave the keynote address at the rally. “Quite frankly, I didn’t think anybody else was going to run.”

When Sanders announced his campaign,

Turner continues to be drawn back into the endless clamor rehashing the 2016 primary.

Turner said, her husband called her, saying, “This guy sounds just like you!” She remembered Sanders from his eight-and-a-halfhour speech in 2010 decrying a bipartisan tax deal, and the idea that he might run that kind of uncompromising campaign stuck with her. His calls for Medicare for All reminded her of her mother’s untimely death; College for All recalled her own grind to become a first-generation college graduate. But friends warned her: “If you do this, they’re going to come for you.”

It still frustrates Turner that people “don’t understand the deliberate way I made this decision.” She had to resign her position with the state party, and MSNBC got wind of her endorsement as she was on the way to Iowa. “You would have thought I said that I was running for president,” she laughed.

“When that word got out, it just went like wildfire.” But the warnings had been right: People did come for her, on Twitter and in private. That first day, she said, she cried.

“Democrats will rail against Republicans and Republicans will rail against Democrats, but both power structures do basically the same thing to people on the inside who don’t bend to their will,” Turner said.

“That is the side of politics that is ugly and that is the side of politics internally that I want to be a part of changing.”

Turner has “no regrets” about aligning with Sanders’s movement, even though she’s taken plenty of flak for it. The expectation that as a woman, and particularly as a Black woman, she was inherently disposed to support Clinton makes her laugh now, with a look in her eyes that says she’s sick of this subject, but knows she has to talk about it. “A. Philip Randolph was a leftist,” she said of the legendary Black union organizer and civil

MIKE FERGUSON

Nina Turner campaigns to represent the Ohio district where she has spent most of her life.

rights leader. “The working class comes in all shapes and sizes and identities. It always has been that way and always will be.”

In fact, the left’s recent electoral success has been led by Black and brown people, immigrants and children of immigrants.

Even before Sanders’s run for the presidency, there was Chokwe Lumumba in Jackson, Mississippi, and Kshama Sawant in Seattle.

Around the country, there are local elected officials like khalid kamau in South Fulton, Georgia; Jabari Brisport, Jessica Ramos, and others in New York’s state legislature; and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez, and the other members of the city council’s Democratic Socialist Caucus in Chicago. In Congress, the core “Squad” looks like today’s working class: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Latina and former bartender from the Bronx; Ilhan Omar, from the same Somali immigrant community where workers made the first dent in Amazon’s armor; Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American

daughter of a Ford factory worker who in her every speech acknowledges her roots in Detroit’s Black struggle; and the incandescent Cori Bush, who roots her politics in her days and nights in the Ferguson uprising, and who alongside Black former school principal Jamaal Bowman traveled to Alabama to support Amazon workers’ union drive.

The fights may continue on Twitter, but in the real world, people simply get on with the work, organizing around the issues that touch their lives. Turner’s recognition of the connections between racial and class struggles could make her an oddly unifying figure in Congress—but her foes still want to characterize her as a troublemaker.

FOR THE LAST FIVE years, Turner has

been the most visible face of the Sanders movement besides Sanders’s own. She was president of Our Revolution, the group that inherited Sanders’s email list and some of his movement’s momentum, from 2016 to 2019.

Like many organizations spun off from a rebel candidate’s unsuccessful electoral campaign—or indeed, successful one, if Barack Obama’s Organizing for America is to be included—Our Revolution had a harder time filtering its focus down to the grassroots level than it did marshaling support for the name-brand candidate. Just because it has access to the coveted email list doesn’t mean that it can maintain the level of intensity of a presidential campaign in the years in between.

What would Our Revolution be? Would it fight for policies or do political education?

Would it organize at the grassroots or be a PAC for endorsing candidates? It’s not, after all, as if the U.S. lacks for progressive political organizations, from MoveOn to DSA. Turner was invested in making OR a venue for coalition-building, at a deeper level than hitting people up for donations every two or four years. The Black church, she noted, is a constant campaign stop for Democrats

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 35

who then don’t show up until the next election. “It’s not so much that you’re going to be able to solve every problem that they have,” she said, “but people don’t want to be used.”

Our Revolution consisted of hundreds of chapters and over a quarter-million members across the country; Turner described visiting all but three states during her time there. However, David Duhalde, OR’s former political director, wrote in Jacobin, “the truth behind these numbers painted a more complex picture of a grassroots group trying to square its democratic and insurgent narrative with a traditional nonprofit structure and nonuniform separation of power.”

Turner, Duhalde told me, supported local groups making decisions for themselves, and campaigned for candidates up and down the ballot. “She knew as a former state representative the importance of building a bench and how much politics happens locally.”

But Turner also had public critics. Erika Andiola, OR’s political director before Duhalde, wrote that she was fired for her

36 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

involvement with direct action around the DREAM Act, and criticized Turner’s hiring of Tezlyn Figaro, sharing screenshots of Figaro’s tweets referring to “illegal immigrants.” Lucy Flores, another prominent early Sanders backer and OR board member, left the group, telling Politico that she’d been concerned that Latinx issues were getting short shrift within the group and that Turner spent more time building her own profile at the expense of the organization. (Figaro later filed suit against OR for racial discrimination.)

Duhalde, for his part, spoke highly of Turner’s stewardship of the organization.

“She was an amazing leader and I think that there’s a lot of things that she led on in the Berniecrat movement that she doesn’t get credit for,” he said.

Of her time with OR, Turner said that presidential campaigns can sweep a lot of disagreement under the rug temporarily, as disparate supporters rally to a particular candidate. “In politics—especially electoral politics—we build this soft coalition,” she

said. “It’s not sturdy because you are not really getting to know and hear from the people what their hopes and dreams and fears are.”

Turner, like the majority of OR’s staff, left the organization to return to Sanders’s second presidential campaign, and OR’s new leadership has focused on jobs and on challenging President Biden to do better by workers in a changing economy. (I wrote about some of that work for the Prospect in November.)

But its effectiveness still varies state by state.

In Ohio, the local organizing is just emerging from the pandemic, according to Diane Morgan, chair of OR Ohio. She’s been organizing online events, some socially distanced rallies, and plenty of phone-banking last fall to defeat Trump, and to prepare for a contested election. The organization has also worked on reforming Cleveland’s city council, and organized around a civilian police review board. Of course, they’re also getting the vote out for Nina Turner.

“We’ve got these ‘I’m vaccinated’ buttons that people can wear when they go out and

MIKE FERGUSON

Nina Turner makes the rounds at an event held by local religious groups giving away free gasoline.

None of the crises Turner was facing when she last held office have gone away.

canvass to show people when they’re at the door,” she said. “And we’ve got people from across the country sending out postcards.”

Despite its struggles, Turner said that the value of OR and the Sanders campaign was that “it made people believe that politics could bend towards the will of the everyday person.” And to OR members in Ohio, Morgan said, Turner continues that practice.

“When we send someone to Congress, it’s going to have to be someone who’s really going to go there and fight for us.”

THE SQUAD MEMBERS have all endorsed Turner in the crowded 11th District primary, with 13 candidates scheduled to square off on August 3. So have a long list of unions, and progressive groups like the Working Families Party, MoveOn, Justice Democrats, and of course Our Revolution, the Sanders campaign spinoff she used to run.

But so have several mainstream Democrats, including Cleveland’s mayor, Frank Jackson, and a string of state and local legislators. Turner’s disinterest in calling herself a socialist may have cost her Cleveland Democratic Socialists of America’s endorsement, but Akron DSA endorsed her anyway. She came up through the Democratic Party mainstream—even dabbling in pro–charter school “education reform” while in the state Senate—but took the last four years to devote herself to building its left and to reforming its institutions. While her campaign ads still call for Medicare for All and other positions to the left of President Biden, she’s toned down her criticisms of him to a degree, and tried to focus on running a campaign that will fire up progressives around policy rather than by

attacking the establishment wing.

Perhaps more than any of Sanders’s other prominent supporters, Turner has paid a price for her move to the left. From the moment she announced the congressional run, there was a call for “Anybody but Nina” to oppose her for Fudge’s seat. “That gave me some pause,” she said. ‘Damn, really?!

Anybody but me?!’”

When we spoke, she’d been recently stung by insinuations that her position on Israel would hurt her relationship with her Jewish constituents. (Turner has spoken out against anti-BDS laws, though she is not a BDS supporter; she had approvingly retweeted an action by anti-occupation Jewish organization If NotNow; she supports placing conditions on military aid to Israel—none of which are extreme positions but which place her certainly outside of the lockstep support for Israel that is one of the last bipartisan positions in D.C.) Her main opponent, Shontel Brown, has been endorsed by Democratic Majority for Israel and has swiped at Turner over it. Four pro-Israel Democrats backed Brown as well, and in late June DMFI planned a super PAC ad against Turner. “They hit people like me, [Jamaal] Bowman in New York, Ilhan Omar,” Turner said. “It is very disheartening to me because I am a freedom fighter through and through.” But once again, Turner’s instincts are more aligned with where the public is going: This spring and summer have seen the largest pro-Palestine demonstrations in America in recent memory.

More recently, Brown received an endorsement from perhaps the only figure in politics more polarizing than Turner: Hillary Clinton. Within 24 hours of that announcement, Turner had raised over $100,000 online, the campaign’s largest single-day fundraising haul, with an average donation of $22.

Meanwhile, senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a PAC made up of corporate lobbyists have been raising money for Brown at high-dollar events.

And on the heels of Clinton’s endorsement, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), number three in House leadership and the highest-ranking Black member of Congress, stepped in to endorse Brown. While he denied that his decision to make the rare endorsement was

about Turner, he did decry “sloganeering” from the left, particularly “defund the police,” which, he said, is “cutting the throats of the party.” Turner also raised over $100,000 online overnight, after the Clyburn news.

Turner’s campaign polling had her well out in front of the pack as of early June, a combination of name recognition, a strong ground game (the office was packed with volunteers on the chilly May morning I visited), and a national fundraising base. But she and her staff were taking nothing for granted. “Because of the whole ‘Anybody but Nina’ thing, there will be independent expenditures well over a million dollars,” she told me. Her campaign is looking to raise up to $6 million and potentially more to push back on attacks; they are more than halfway there. “There are very few people who can actually run for Congress because most people will never be able to raise that level of money,” she said. “So how is that in service to our democracy? [We need] public financing of campaigns, period.”

None of the crises Turner was facing when she last held office have gone away.

They’ve been joined by a whole new crisis: COVID-19, and its exposure of the cracks in our economic and social systems. But the pandemic can be, Turner noted, an opportunity to change things for the better. The free vaccines, for example, could be the beginning of an experiment in publicly provided health care. “I often say, ‘There is promise in the problem,’” she said. “We’ve got to use this crisis to go big.”

MAY 8 WAS COLD AND gray in Cleveland.

But Turner, wrapped in a black leather trench coat, bounced from person to person in her platform Converse high-tops, all energy as she gave masked-up hugs and elbow bumps to supporters by a van with a spinning marquee of her face on top. We were at “Gas on God,” an event held by local religious groups giving away free gasoline, and Turner was making the rounds.

In the gas line, someone handed an iPhone through the window to Turner so she could greet the person on the other end of a FaceTime call. She jogged alongside the car as they rolled into place at the pump. She posed for selfies with members of Christian motor-

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 37

cycle clubs in matching monogrammed leather, and greeted her supporters holding signs along the side of the road by name.

“Vote for me, I have the courage to ask for more,” she told a smartphone video.

“Given COVID,” she noted later, “I felt really good to be out there. We’re in my community and just to feel that love from people … Some of those people I knew, some of those people I have never seen before, but the energy was palpable and it was what I needed.”

District 11, and Cleveland in particular, is a microcosm of American decline. A oncerich city—Standard Oil began there, and iron and steel production dominated during its heyday—it now ranks as the poorest big city in America. As a Black woman from the Rust Belt, Turner knows firsthand that while the fallout from deindustrialization hit everyone, it struck the Black community

38 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

first. Akshai Singh, a member of Cleveland DSA and local organizer, noted that it’s still a struggle to turn health care and education jobs—the closest thing to a replacement for long-gone heavy industry—into good union jobs that provide a real living.

Activists in the area who spoke with me independently of the Turner campaign described a stagnant city political machine and a police force that continues to brutalize people. Cleveland was where a police officer shot Tamir Rice, and where battles continue over a federal consent decree instituted in 2015 over the police department’s “pattern or practice of using excessive force.”

Chrissy Stonebraker-Martínez, an organizer with the InterReligious Task Force for Human Rights on Central America and Colombia, noted that despite Cleveland’s long history of left-wing organiz-

ing, activists are often struggling just to achieve the basics. “We spent the entire year post-uprising fighting for public comment at city council meetings because we don’t even have public comment.”

Aisia Jones, a Black Lives Matter organizer who recently announced her run for Cleveland City Council, pointed to the need for emergency services that don’t immediately route to police. “Cleveland is poor.

Period,” Jones said. “How can we make a better atmosphere for us? That has to do with better public safety and public health, better city services, more opportunities for recreation, more opportunities for jobs, youth programming, senior programming.”

Revitalization without gentrification, without displacement of the people who’ve stayed in Cleveland, she said, has to be the goal.

Jones is enthusiastic about Turner’s cam-

MIKE FERGUSON

Campaign signs dot a Cleveland gas station where Nina Turner spoke with constituents.

Turner knows firsthand that while the fallout from deindustrialization hit everyone, it struck the Black community first.

ic.” And things, they all noted, were about to get worse for those on the wrong side of the unequal recovery. Republican governors began cutting unemployment benefits in June, and the CDC’s eviction moratorium expires at the end of July. While Democrats failed to act, Turner explained, their opponents keep people in “struggle mode,” where they can’t think beyond day-to-day needs.

“People deserve to enjoy their lives,” she concluded. “The whole attitude of the power class is that poor people, working people don’t deserve to enjoy their lives.”

IF NINA TURNER HEADS to Congress in the

paign, and about potentially working with her. “She’s more real than I thought. She was just like, ‘I don’t have all the answers, but you tell me what I can do for you. You tell me what we can work on together.’” StonebrakerMartínez was more hesitant, but noted that Turner “has gone out on a limb for progressive policies at risk to herself, at risk to her career.” Many elected officials, they noted, tend to be more progressive domestically than they are on international issues—they pointed to the ongoing protests in Colombia, and the United States’ funding of security forces there. “Those are the things that I’m concerned about with Nina, but I’m also grateful,” they said, “that if she is elected, we can go into her office and talk about these things. Right now, we can’t even do that.”

In another part of Cleveland, Turner sat down with local elected officials who’d endorsed her at Bob-N-Sheri’s Fortyniner, an old-school diner with Rock-Ola jukeboxes at the counter. (Its owners are supporters.) The breakfast included the mayors of Newburgh Heights and University Heights, two Cleveland suburbs, as well as two state representatives and a member of Newburgh Heights’ council. The meeting was part informal catch-up session, part strategy discussion, over eggs and grits.

“How do we change the system so it feels like a system for all of us?” asked Juanita O. Brent, who represents Ohio House District 12. “People are scared that the floor is going to fall out.” Stephanie Howse, who represents the neighboring District 11, agreed: “There was a pandemic before the pandem-

fall, she’ll be doing so with a lot of pressure to make things happen, in a city and an institution where so often nothing happens.

She’s very aware of the sense of urgency, saying, “When Democrats win, peoples’ lives should change.” Yet she’d be one member in a body of 435 where your voice is often determined by your seniority.

Turner has a laundry list of issues she wants to work on: police reform, jobs and higher wages, Medicare for All, public education after a pandemic. She pointed to a recent report that found that residents in two Cleveland-area census tracts just two miles apart had a stunning 23-year difference in life expectancy.

She’s also thinking about that looming housing crisis. “I want to marry the Green New Deal with housing,” she said, suggesting money allocated under that framework could be used to restore the abandoned homes that dot the city in an energy-efficient manner, and then help local people to buy them. “The Green New Deal means putting people back to work in a way that’s viable for them and their family, making the communities that they live in beautiful.” And as part of that project, she said, it’s important to make sure people are paid well enough to have free time. “To me,” she said, “quality of life means I get to smell the roses from time to time and that there are some roses that I can smell.”

These are big ideas and there certainly isn’t a majority in Congress supporting them yet. But Turner’s time at Our Revolution has given her some experience working with grassroots organizers to press elected

officials to act. Those relationships can help when it comes to internal party fights, she noted, pushing Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who have stonewalled voting rights changes or minimum-wage increases. “There’s something to be said about stepping into their turf and starting to organize those people because people are suffering in their state, too.”

She spoke of “awakening sleeping giants,” the way that Ohioans came together to defeat Senate Bill 5, the measure that stripped collective-bargaining rights away from public-sector workers in 2011. To overturn that measure, she said, it took unions and activists, but they also had to get the message across to non-union workers that the next time the legislature overstepped, it could come for them. “We have to try to get that back, that sense that no matter what happens in this state, in my district, in the state, in this nation, in some way we are all interconnected,” she said. “If my air is dirty, so is yours. If my water is dirty, so is yours. If your daughter or son doesn’t have a job and that impacts your household, it impacts mine.”

That’s where Turner’s style, while abrasive to mainstream Democrats, holds a lesson for them. Ultimately, she wants to invite regular people to join her in fighting for progressive ideas. For years, Democrats have had trouble defining themselves to the broader electorate. Turner has mined the activist movement space and found a coherent message that resonates with workingclass people in a bellwether state. Beyond the Clinton-Sanders wars, that’s something all sides could take away.

Republicans, Turner noted, “don’t play” when they have power, and Democrats should take that lesson from them if none other. That sense of urgency is too often lacking in the party. “When are we going to learn? Republicans plan for the long term,” she said. “What can we do right now before the next election cycle and get it done and go big? Because power is fleeting. You’ve got to use it while you’ve got it.” n Sarah Jaffe is a reporting fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Work Won’t Love You Back.

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 39

Social Democ THE AGONY

Why did social democracy collapse?

Can Joe Biden point the way to a resurgent trans-Atlantic democratic left?

IN THE UNITED STATES, we have a national

administration whose program, though far from socialist, is more progressive than any since Franklin Roosevelt’s. But in Europe, where citizens have had substantial experience with constructive social democracy, the democratic left is all but dead. Somehow, the U.S. and Europe have reversed roles. What happened?

As recently as a generation ago, European social democracy seemed well entrenched.

In the late 1990s, 13 of the 15 member governments of the European Union were leftof-center coalitions led by social democrats.

Today, with the EU having grown to 27 member states, just six European counties have center-left prime ministers, and the social democratic vote in most of continental Europe has dwindled to 20 percent or less. The French Socialist Party, which held the presidency as recently as 2017, is near collapse. The German SPD got just 20.5 percent of the vote in the most recent federal election, also in 2017, its lowest share since before World War I, and is now polling around 15 percent, well below the Greens.

The British Labour Party is languishing in the polls, far behind the comic-opera Tory prime minister, Boris Johnson.

Even the exceptions are shaky. Sweden, long the epitome of European social democracy, has had a weak, minority two-party coalition with the Greens led by a Social

40 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

Democratic prime minister, Stefan Löfven, supported in parliament by two center-right parties and the Left Party. The government recently collapsed over rent control. Löfven lost a vote of confidence in June after the Left Party withdrew its support, and barely won a vote to proceed with a newly configured coalition for the final year of his term.

In the 2018 election, the Social Democrats got their lowest share of the national vote in a century. In Denmark, the social democratic prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, leads a four-party coalition, also reliant on the votes of non-socialists. In the last election, her party got 25.9 percent of the vote. In Spain, a talented social democrat, Pedro Sánchez, leads a minority government in fragile coalition with the further left Podemos and a Catalan party. In the two 2019 elections, his party got about 28 and 29 percent of the vote. Only in small Portugal is there a durable, popular, and effective all-left coalition government, led by the socialists, who received over 36 percent of the vote.

Elsewhere in the EU’s 27 member states, the right governs.

In the spirit of Tolstoy, one can report that each European nation’s social democratic party is unhappy in its own way. But it’s evident that some common system-wide blight felled Europe’s entire social democratic movement. The particulars are

PAUL CHIASSON / AP PHOTO

By Robert Kuttner

ratic Europe OF

French socialist President François Mitterrand in 1981

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 41

diverse and complicated, but let me give away the punch line: The common blight is neoliberalism. That phrase has been used to mean lots of things. I use it to mean the deregulation of capital and labor, and the ideological claim that these shifts were necessary to make the economy more efficient.

That proved to be profoundly wrong. Mainly, market liberalization changed relations of power and wealth.

The post-1973 globalized rules of the market made it much harder to sustain social democracy in one country—and more difficult for a democratic state to govern capitalism at all. Market inequality and market values then fed on themselves, undermining the social solidarity that social democracy requires, and reducing the credibility of the benign state. Even worse, several center-left parties of the late 1990s, most notably those in Britain under Tony Blair and Germany under Gerhard Schroeder, outdid conservatives in embracing neoliberalism. And the European Union, viewed by many Americans as sort of leftish, was actually a prime vector in the spread of enforced marketization.

The financial collapse of 2008 was the coup de grâce. The collapse, and the recession that followed, were the bitter fruit of the extreme financial deregulation that had been embraced by center-left as well as center-right. Europe’s turn to austerity—still more neoliberalism—as the preposterous cure for financial collapse and recession drove voters away from all the mainstream parties. This was a gift for the ultra-nationalist right, which has been gaining ground everywhere in Europe for more than a decade. When voters looked for a radical alternative to austerity, they did not find it on the watered-down center-left.

The rise of new anti-system parties also made national parliaments that much more fragmented and reliant on weak, multiparty coalition governments that could do little more than tread water.

If Europe needed one more nail in the center-left coffin, it was the arrival of the refugee crisis. As good social liberals, Europe’s social democrats had supported humane policies toward refugees.

Given the ethnic homogeneity of much of the continent, this was a stretch even

42 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

when times were good. When the economy turned bad, right-wing nationalist antiimmigrant parties captured much of the usually social democratic working-class vote. The backlash was not just against refugees from Syria or Somalia. The EU’s basic law, the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, provides for free movement of EU citizens throughout the Union. The right-wing resentment was directed as much against Polish plumbers in Birmingham or Bulgarian construction workers in Berlin as against darker-skinned refugees.

Was this cumulative downfall in some sense inevitable, given structural changes in the political economy of capitalism and the fact that postwar social democracy was built on unique historical circumstances?

Or was it the result of optional and opportunistic decisions that might have been different? Conversely, since the U.S. led the way both to global neoliberalism and lately to its repudiation, might the Biden administration prefigure the revival of a more social economy throughout the West? And does an existential climate crisis that cries out for collective action create new opportunities or new divisions?

IN THE TRENTE GLORIEUSES , as the

French call them—the 30 years of the postwar boom—there was a lucky convergence of economics, ideology, and geopolitics. The war had discredited the fascist right, the libertarian right, and a collaborationist corporate right. No serious players in that era believed in laissez-faire—a most unusual condition for capitalism.

In the democracies, the argument was between social democrats and statist conservatives who were also willing to create an expansive welfare state to hold Stalinism at bay.

In the 1950s, social democrats had influence mainly as opposition parties. Christian Democrats were the prime architects of Western Europe’s postwar system. Except in Britain and Scandinavia, social democratic governments came later.

The United States, eager to keep communism out of Western

Europe, was in the role of benign hegemon, supplying dollars and public capital via the Marshall Plan, giving each nation-state plenty of sovereignty, willing to indulge leftists as long as they were anti-communists.

Commerce had restarted, but there was no drive for ultra-marketization. Thanks to fixed exchange rates and capital controls under the Bretton Woods system, and the national economic planning and public capital stimulated by the Marshall Plan, democratic states could and did govern markets.

The project of economic recovery stimulated a general boom. The power of trade unions (some of them communist-led) and the burgeoning welfare state, coupled with tight limits on speculative private finance, meant that the boom would be broadly egalitarian. Even conservatives recognized the need to regulate capitalism.

In Britain, a frankly socialist Labour government led by Clement Attlee created the modern welfare state in the late 1940s, and it was continued by the Tories under Winston Churchill and then Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan in the 1950s. In France, the nationalist Charles de Gaulle began the French postwar version of welfare capitalism in 1945 and 1946, leading a three-party coalition that included socialists and communists, and then returned as prime minister in 1958, then as president in 1959 under a new constitution. In West Germany, where the Christian Democrats barely defeated the Social Democrats in the Bundestag in 1949 to form the first postwar government,

In much of Europe, there was a managed form of capitalism with a strong welfare state, unions recognized as legitimate social partners, and even some islands of public ownership.

Willy Brandt, chancellor in the first postwar SPD-led government

ALFRED HENNIG / AP PHOTO

Konrad Adenauer’s policies were a blend of market liberalism leavened by substantial regulation, strong unions, and welfare spending.

Thus in much of Europe, there was a managed form of capitalism with a strong welfare state, unions recognized as legitimate social partners, and even some islands of public ownership. We were also a long way from the kind of hyper free trade, free capital movement, privatization, and deregulation demanded and secured by neoliberalism. The emerging common market was a customs union and a tariff-free zone, but not yet an engine of free markets generally.

Nation-states had plenty of sovereignty to devise their own systems.

FOR THE MOST PART, postwar social

democracy stopped well short of democratic socialism. What’s the difference?

Social democracy relies more heavily on the social income of a welfare state, on the labor power of collective bargaining, and on macroeconomic efforts to keep the economy at full employment. Basically, it is heav-

ily regulated welfare capitalism. In some countries, such as France and Italy, the state plays a more direct role. In other regions, notably Scandinavia, strong unions and social bargaining are key. But under social democracy, industry and finance are mostly private. And in an economy where capitalists retain residual power and wealth, keeping capitalism harnessed in a broad public interest requires just about everything to break right. The Swedes managed it for half a century. Elsewhere, it faltered earlier.

In the 1940s, there was a famous argument between John Maynard Keynes and his quasi-Marxist protégé, Michal Kalecki. The Polish-born Kalecki conceded as a matter of technical economics that it was indeed possible, as Keynes had argued, to overlay full employment onto a system that remained basically capitalist. But as a matter of politics, Kalecki added, the capitalists will never let you do it. At the time, Keynes seemed to have won the argument. Today, Kalecki is looking prescient.

Europe’s postwar social democrats had inherited from their more radical forebears

more of a socialist ideology. In Britain, the Labour Party’s famous Clause IV, adopted in 1918, called for “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” It was ditched by the neoliberal Tony Blair in 1995 as a relic. In Germany, the SPD also had a legacy clause committing it to socializing the means of production. But this was repudiated by the party’s Bad Godesberg program of 1959, which repositioned the SPD as more of a middle-class party and helped pave the way for the first SPD-led government in 1969 under Willy Brandt.

But as Kalecki might have predicted, all it took was one bad decade for the systemic preconditions of effective social democracy to be blown away. A strategy of high taxes and good services depended on full employment and broad consent. In the 1970s, the combination of inflation, slower growth, and high unemployment stressed the model to the breaking point. In 1973, President Nixon ended the Bretton Woods system, whose fixed exchange rates limited the speculative and deflationary impact of global capital.

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

In Britain, where a Labour government was in charge, the stagflation of the 1970s exposed all the system’s fissures. Unlike Sweden, British trade unions never really embraced collaborative social bargaining.

In 1969, the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, had tried to move the British labor movement more in a Scandinavian direction.

His employment minister, Barbara Castle, produced a white paper promoting consensual social bargaining titled “In Place of Strife.”

The class-conscious unions were having none of it. What they wanted was strife.

A decade later, in the so-called winter of discontent, efforts by unions to defend their incomes in the face of high inflation and high unemployment led to a series of publicworker strikes. Rubbish piled up, corpses could not be buried because of a gravediggers’ walkout, and even some ambulance drivers refused to work. Caught between unions and outraged citizens, the government of Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan got clobbered in the 1979 general election. The beneficiary was Margaret Thatcher and 18 years of hard-right rule.

When Labour finally got back to power in 1997 under Tony Blair, he was determined to make over Labour into a middle-class party, to purge the left, and weaken the trade union movement. Blair succeeded in this, but badly split his party and left it divided between an affluent cosmopolitan wing and a working class that was falling further and further behind. Labour has yet to recover.

In France, meanwhile, the same period of economic distress in the 1970s brought the left to power. In 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president of France with a mandate to pursue not just social democracy, but something closer to democratic socialism, including substantial public ownership of banks and industry. But in the years between Attlee in Britain and Mitterrand in France, the rules of international capitalism had been changed. With exchange rates back in speculative play and capital fully mobile, money traders could bet against the franc. After two devaluations and failed emergency capital controls, a humiliated Mitterrand reversed course, and embraced something like neoliberalism with a human

face. Had capital been as mobile in 1945 as it was in 1981, Attlee would not have stood a chance.

Even in Sweden, the economic situation of high inflation in the 1970s, followed by high interest rates and an overly strong dollar in the post–Bretton Woods 1980s, created international conditions that were increasingly toxic for social-democracyin-one-country. The Swedish model was far more than a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Trade union economists Gosta Rehn, Rudolf Meidner, and Clas-Erik Odhner, working with industry counterparts, had devised a very astute system for a highperformance, export-led economy that was also highly egalitarian.

One pillar was an “active labor market policy,” meaning continuous upgrading of the workforce in the context of full employment. When the world economy hit a downturn, exports fell, and Swedish unemployment rose, slots would be opened for workers to take well-paid retraining sabbaticals. Government would subsidize regional economic development, and as a last resort

AP PHOTO

Sweden’s beloved social democrat Prime Minister Olof Palme

44 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

The Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the EU, required free movement of capital, goods, services, and people. This provision undermined the ability of member states to regulate capital.

create good public-service jobs. This package kept Sweden competitive and workers fully employed. Most of this model was not government-led. It was the result of social bargaining between union federations and employer federations. Around 90 percent of the workforce, including white-collar workers, belonged to unions, which were the core institutions of Swedish social democracy.

The other ingenious aspect, with positive feedback effects, was a “solidarity wage” policy—continuous efforts to narrow wage differentials, within and between sectors.

Unions deliberately resisted the tendency of high-skilled workers in short supply to try to bid up their wages.

They did this both as anti-inflation medicine to keep the Swedish export economy globally competitive and to narrow the wage spread between more highly skilled and less-skilled workers. Thus, when a worker needed to change occupations because of changing industrial conditions, there was less risk of lost income. It made for a highly educated and globally competitive economy. The model, however, depended on the national sovereignty to devise a system uniquely reflecting Swedish democratic design. Sweden was an outward-looking economy that relied on exports, but that also had the space to create its own social compact. Norway and Denmark had local variants on a broadly similar model, again

with a key role for unions and for consensual social bargaining.

When the global slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s hit, the system was stressed. In Sweden, voters unhappy with the economic downturn elected a conservative/liberal coalition government in 1976, which began undermining the model and weakening the role of unions. To compete, Social Democrats also introduced elements of marketization. Two other conservative governments were elected, in 1991, and again in 2006.

By the 21st century, Sweden was a less equal nation, and market values as well as market policies were crowding out egalitarian and solidarity values. (If I am more highly skilled, I deserve higher pay.) Today, the active labor market policy looks more like that of the U.S.: Report to the unemployment office and prove that you’ve been looking for a job. Training subsidies are far less generous. In the last couple of elections, the conservative party has expressly sought to divide Swedes by class, and brand the Social Democrats as the party of losers.

Their slogan: If you depend on welfare, vote for the Social Democrats; if you work for a living, vote for us.

When I visited Sweden a decade ago, conservatives were well on their way to undermining the Swedish model while pretending to uphold it. Joakim Palme, a social scientist and the son of late beloved prime minister Olof Palme, who was murdered in 1986, told me, “Social Democrats led the way in introducing more competition in the public sector, but you have to be very careful about which sectors and what rules, because it’s a slippery slope.” One well-intentioned decision of Social Democrats that backfired was the idea of shaking up the public-school system by allowing parents or teachers to create alternative schools paid for by tax money. When the conservatives took power in 1991, they opened ownership to for-profit corporations, which marketed their schools to smart and healthy kids and avoided those with special needs.

When I returned to Sweden in 2015, a new

factor was the divisive role of immigration and the backlash of many otherwise progressive voters. All of these forces undermined Swedish social solidarity and weakened the Social Democrats as its standard-bearer. In 2019, the former Social Democratic prime minister Ingvar Carlsson, who sponsored some of the pro-market reforms in the 1980s, told a French interviewer, “We made a serious mistake: we underestimated the political strength of neoliberalism.”

NEOLIBERALISM HAD a strong ally in the

European Union. The EU has been very good on some issues, such as climate and privacy, but when it comes to the basic regulation of capitalism, the EU is emphatically pro-market and anti-state. The predecessor European Community left far more room for national policy. But the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which created the EU, required free movement of capital, goods, services, and people. As subsequently interpreted by the European Court of Justice, this provision undermined the ability of states to regulate capital in multiple ways. The ECJ overturned state requirements of minimum wages on construction contracts and allowed corporations based in one member country to violate local collective-bargaining agreements in another. In practice, a Bulgarian worker sent to Belgium by a staffing agency to work on construction could be paid Bulgarian wages and effectively be sheltered from local labor standards.

Maastricht also promoted privatization of public functions, such as passenger rail and postal service, in the name of greater market competition.

The EU had one other consequence whose perverse effects became obvious only after the collapse of 2008. A crowning achievement of Maastricht was the creation of the euro. In exchange for giving up their cherished deutsche mark, the Germans insisted on stringent budgetary requirements for every member nation of the EU. Debt and deficit ratios were strictly limited, but there was no European-wide sharing of fiscal burdens. Maastricht was approved just after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany in 1989. One paradoxical consequence was

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

that France and other nations were eager to contain a new enlarged Germany in a more powerful EU—and that gave the Germans substantial leverage over the terms.

The euro was entrusted to the new European Central Bank (ECB), which was responsible to multiple masters, and was given fewer powers than the American Federal Reserve. One result of the euro was that nations like Italy, Spain, and Greece, with historically weak currencies, were now issuing bonds in euros rather than in lira, pesetas, or drachmas. That meant investors could buy those bonds without worrying about the risk of devaluation, and nations of Southern Europe accustomed to paying higher interest rates were in the happy position of getting credit at rates almost as low as the hardcurrency Germans. In their euphoria about avoiding devaluation risk, markets missed the more serious risk of default.

For social democrats, the gross miscalculation was to assent to a federation that required extreme liberalization of capital but with no common tax and fiscal provisions. When the collapse of 2008 came, the crash and its aftermath were more serious than their U.S. counterpart because the ECB lacked the Fed’s anti-depression tools, and because the budgetary rules, which Berlin and Brussels refused to waive, required austerity. For nations like Greece or Spain, the only remedy was to require them to borrow a lot more money, at punitive rates, to repay creditors. Northern Europeans led

by Germany resented the presumed profligacy of the south. In the emblematic Greek crisis, two casualties of the administered depression that followed the collapse were PASOK, a model social democratic reformist regime, and its more radical successor, Syriza. Neither could withstand the enforced austerity. A broader casualty was European prosperity and the credibility of the kind of activist government associated with social democrats.

Each major European nation thus presents its own variation on the theme. A common element is the erosion of the class politics in which the social democrats were the champion of the traditional working class. In much of Europe today, there has been an inversion. Those who vote for the

46 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

center-left party are increasingly middleclass people with cosmopolitan values such as concern for climate change, LGBT rights, racial justice, and feminism. Meanwhile, as recession-level unemployment drags into its second decade, the traditional working class sees the social democrats delivering precious little, and migrates to the right.

This is, of course, similar to the American dynamic, where the move of Democrats toward greater social and cultural liberalism and away from broadly shared prosperity seeded the ground for Trump within the white working class.

Brexit displayed a uniquely British version of this dynamic. The Labour Party’s base is divided into a socially conservative working-class electorate in the economically depressed north, and cosmopolitan professionals in the prosperous south around Greater London. Even though depressed areas attract relatively few migrants, the open immigration allowed by the EU became a symbol in the working-class north of how EU membership was bad for the locals. Brexit cleft the party in two: According to the BBC, the four constituencies that supported Remain by the largest margin were Labour, as were three of the top six constituencies voting for Leave.

Small wonder the party could not define a position on Brexit that was not divisive of its base. The Labour leader at the time of the Brexit vote, Jeremy Corbyn, a longtime Euro-skeptic, tried his best to fudge his position, and failed. Labour was also badly divided into more left-wing followers of Corbyn and more centrist supporters of the EU and Blairism.

Meanwhile, the bizarre Tory leader, Boris Johnson, got very lucky in the timing of the pandemic. When Brexit narrowly passed, serious economists and business leaders predicted catastrophe, because the British economy is so closely tied to the European. That may yet come. Johnson has tried to minimize the damage by having Britain basically follow EU rules (except on immigration) even though Britain no longer has any

say over policy in Brussels. But while the EU’s procurement of vaccines bogged down in national rivalries and delays by Eurocrats concerned with budget impacts, Johnson followed the U.S. approach and spent whatever it took to get vaccines for his citizens. British voters are thankful to have been spared the EU’s vaccine fiasco, Brexit looks like a blessing in disguise, and Johnson now runs well ahead of Labour in the polls.

THE GERMAN SPD, the world’s oldest social

democratic party, is suffering death from a thousand cuts. The opportunistic policy shifts by Gerhard Schroeder, the SPD chancellor in the late 1990s, badly split the party and removed traditional protections for labor. Schroeder’s so-called Hartz IV reforms, named for the labor relations director of VW who orchestrated them, created a new category of “mini-jobs” and divided Germany’s working class into those who still enjoyed protections and those who did not. Schroeder also deregulated financial markets, breaking up Germany’s system of “blockholder capitalism,” in which banks were major shareholders of corporations and provided the patient capital that spared corporate planners the pressure to produce short-run returns and allowed for long-term investment and planning (and reliable wages). Today, German financial capitalism is more Anglo-Saxon. The Schroeder government also cut taxes on the wealthy, and substantially privatized

If a left might revive in Germany, it is more likely to be led by the Greens than the Social Democrats, but the polls do not project majority support for a left coalition government.

BEBETO MAT THEWS / AP PHOTO

Neoliberal SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

pensions. Consequently, retired German workers get less than what their counterparts receive in neighboring Austria, where pensions are still public.

The partisan consequence of this shift was the breakaway of the left wing of the SPD to join with ex-communists from the East, to create a left party—Die Linke—in 2007. In three states, Die Linke has served in coalition governments with the SPD and the Greens, but has never reached more than 12 percent of the vote nationally. Some SPD leaders keep talking about a national coalition with Die Linke, but it is always a generation in the future, since feelings are still bitter from the 2007 split.

Not only did the SPD lose core support due to the breakaway. As traditional blue-collar workers, the longtime core of the SPD, have become a smaller share of the total workforce, that has added to the attrition. On one flank, the SPD has been steadily losing younger voters to the Greens. On the other flank, the rise of the neofascist Alternative für Deutschland, the AfD, has come almost entirely at the expense of the SPD.

This also has a regional dimension. Many of the more enterprising residents of the former DDR moved to the prosperous West.

Many of those who stayed behind have the political attitudes of left-behind workers everywhere—angry, nationalistic, jingoistic. In partisan terms, the anti-communists of the former East Germany view social democracy as too close to communism, so they vote for either the CDU or the far right.

Those who miss the security of communism vote for Die Linke. Squeezed between these extremes, the SPD has never been able to gain traction in the East. And if one thing more were needed, the SPD has had a string of uninspiring leaders, while the CDU and the country have been led by Angela Merkel, a widely respected figure. During the time when the SPD served in two Merkel governments as junior partner, between 2009 and 2017, its inability to define itself and its decline only deepened.

Another paradox: Merkel has been relatively popular not just in personal terms but because she nudged the CDU-led German government more in a social demo-

cratic direction, adopting the first German minimum-wage law and improving health care. This reflected the influence of the SPD as junior coalition partners, but the SPD as a party got little credit. So as policies of welfare capitalism survive, social democracy as a movement is weakened. (It’s also the case that several far-right parties elsewhere in Europe defend the welfare state, but for nationals, and not for migrants. As elsewhere, immigration has strengthened the right in Germany.)

If any sort of left might revive in Germany, it is more likely to be led by the Greens, who are now running second in the polls to the CDU with the next federal election scheduled for this September. The problem, however, is that the German Greens in some respects are not quite a left party, but a party of young and middle-class people whose top concern is the environment and human rights. Mathematically, one possibility could be an anti-CDU coalition government led by the Greens, with the pro-market Free Democrats and the SPD. But that would be far from a left government and would

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

likely intensify the slow decline of the SPD. A Green-SPD-Linke coalition is also conceivable—there are such coalitions in three states led by the SPD—but at this point in the polling, neither Green-led option commands a projected parliamentary majority.

Most likely is another CDU-led government, perhaps in coalition with the Greens.

Austria presents an interesting variation on Germany and Sweden. For 29 years, between 1970 and 1999, Austria was led by social democrats, sometimes in a grand coalition with the center-right Austrian People’s Party. But since 2000, the far-right Austrian Freedom Party has made huge gains, and briefly served in government as the junior coalition partner with the mainstream People’s Party—one of the few cases in Europe of inclusion of the far right in government, another being Norway, where the center-right has been willing to grant respectability to the far right. These gains have come substantially at the expense of the social democrats.

Vienna, a city-state that dominates a

small country, is still led by a popular and effective social democratic government.

And it still boasts a legacy of socialist institutions, including the West’s best program of municipally owned housing. Like the social democratic welfare state everywhere in Europe, legacy institutions have a long half-life; but they steadily erode in the face of neoliberal pressures and the failure of social democratic parties to replicate their broad support among younger voters.

Despite the fact that a generous welfare state is largely intact, the Austrian social democratic party keeps losing workingclass voters to right-wing anti-immigrant nationalists. In the 2017 election, the Social Democrats were in a virtual tie with the far-right Freedom Party, at 26.9 percent and 26.0 percent of the vote, respectively.

In 2019, the Freedom Party suffered internal scandals that caused the government to fall. In the snap election that followed, the Greens made a strong showing, and the current government is a coalition of the center-right and the Greens.

As in Germany, the relationship between social democrats and Greens is also tricky.

The social democrats are historically based on a class politics and an ethic of equitably distributed income and consumption, while, to a greater degree than in the U.S., the green ethic in Europe is cultural and, for some, post-materialist. The Austrian Greens are more left than their German counterparts, and Green coalitions with social democrats are definitely possible, but often come at the latter’s expense.

IN FRANCE, THE COLLAPSE of the left has

been the most profound. After Charles de Gaulle acted in 1958 to convert France into a presidential system under the new Gaullist Fifth Republic, for a time the result was more stable party systems. This was a plus, because France under the postwar Fourth Republic had a fragmented multiparty system with weak coalition governments that seldom lasted more than a year or two. The right held power from 1958 through three presidents, while the left regrouped. In

AP PHOTO

Purveyors of the Third Way Tony Blair and Bill Clinton

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The hopeful news for Europe is the emergence of the Biden administration as a progressive role model. We have come full circle—FDR’s design for postwar Europe helped enable social democracy.

1981, a newly configured Socialist Party elected Mitterrand, with support from the Communists. He served for 14 years.

The next two presidents were both center-right conservatives. Meanwhile, the nationalist far right under Jean-Marie Le Pen, later succeeded by his more presentable daughter, Marine Le Pen, gained ground. In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second-round runoff election, crowding out the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin. He did poorly in 2007, after President Nicolas Sarkozy adopted many ultra-nationalist themes. In 2017, however, Marine Le Pen was the finalist against Emmanuel Macron, and she is expected to be a finalist again in 2022.

While French parties have been becoming more personalist for decades, the 2017 election was implosive even by French standards. The Socialist incumbent, François Hollande, was deeply unpopular and did not run for re-election. The Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, won a bare 6.4 percent of the vote, and ran a weak fifth. In the parliamentary elections that followed a month later, the Socialists were all but wiped out in the Chamber of Deputies.

Macron, meanwhile, had to invent a party, “La République en Marche!” from whole cloth. In the runoff, Le Pen lost 2-to-1, but gained a majority of blue-collar workers. In the French case, the once powerful Communist Party, which had commanded the

loyalty of the working class especially in northeast France, has also lost ground to Le Pen. Why is the whole French political system coming apart? Because the electorate is deeply unhappy and no political party seems able to remedy the distress. Macron attempted reforms of the labor and pension systems, but popular resistance on the part of those who benefit from the status quo forced him to backtrack. Ideologically amorphous protests like the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) reflect general discontent with a stagnant economy and a welfare state that has reached its limits and fails to serve those left behind. French political scientists refer to a society of insiders and outsiders; the insiders benefit from a legacy of regular jobs and related benefits, while the outsiders are on their own; and the ranks of the outsiders who have little stake in the system are growing. Macron, who won election as a competent technocrat, now has approval ratings of around 40 percent. In the recent June regional elections, allies of both Macron and Le Pen did worse than expected; Macron’s party won just 10 percent of the vote. At the same time, neither the Socialists nor their conservative and radical-right rivals have much policy leverage.

WHERE DOES ALL THIS leave the social

democratic project? One piece of good news is the fact that the EU, in the COVID crisis, at last put some serious money into EU-wide recovery measures through a trillion-euro temporary package of loans and grants to member states called Next Generation EU. Unemployment in the euro area after 2008 had slowly declined to a low of 7.2 percent in 2019, still almost double the U.S. rate, but has risen again in the pandemic. With right-wing governments in power in most member states, there is still little support for the idea long pitched by social democrats of EU bonds at the scale needed to underwrite a continent-wide, Biden-style public-investment program. When it comes to marketization, the entire EU is subject to the strict Maastricht rules. When it comes

to investment, each nation is on its own, and still constrained by the EU’s strictures on deficits. Social democrats are loath to give up on the EU because it is seen as a bulwark against toxic nationalism. Yet the more the EU demands austerity, the more fuel it pours on the nationalist fire, and the more the association of mainstream parties with the EU is politically toxic.

The other piece of hopeful news for Europe is the emergence of the Biden administration as a role model. The U.S. does not suffer from the EU’s artificial budget rules, and it has a central bank that can buy all the debt necessary to finance a recovery. We also have less of a contradiction between green goals and other progressive ones. The green aspect of the Biden public-investment program is part of an economic-development strategy, not a cultural expression of anti-materialism. Like “third-way” European leaders Blair and Schroeder, American neoliberal Democratic presidents—Obama, Clinton, and Carter—made some bad decisions that were optional. Biden has made some good ones.

The U.S. has its own version of obstructionist federalism, as well as a right-wing anti-system party—the Republicans—with a much larger share of the vote than any such party in Western Europe. But the country has a progressive administration that knows what it wants, with the capacity to govern without having to negotiate among multiple coalition partners. One of the things the Biden administration wants to do is scrap neoliberalism, whose assumptions have been overtaken by reality. Astonishingly, to the extent that there is a resurgent democratic left, its home is America.

In a way, we have come full circle. Under FDR, the U.S. built the global system on which European social democracy was constructed. Now we must rebuild it, both for our own sake and that of the West and the entire world economy—with public investment at the core, and green public investment at that. There was a time when American progressives made pilgrimages to places like Sweden and Austria. Now, European social democrats are looking the other way across the Atlantic to see what they can learn from us. n

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 49

The Warehouse Archipelago As many as four million workers labor in clusters of warehouses scattered across the United States. Many are mislabeled as ‘temps’; all are poorly paid, and on-the-job injuries are high.

By John Lippert and Stephen Franklin ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROBERT MEGANCK

Every six seconds, the sorting machine would spit out bags of candy as Rebecca Wells waited, robot-like.

She had to grab the bags, weighing up to nine pounds, stuff them into shipping boxes, and then feed the boxes into a taping machine.

The bags coming at her at the Mars, Inc., warehouse in Joliet, Illinois, were filled with American favorites—Skittles, Life Savers, Juicy Fruit.

But it wasn’t a mindless task since the size of the bags and boxes varied continually, based on customer orders. And so she had to pack each box differently and keep up with the sorting machine, even as the smaller bags started popping out at an even faster pace. Given the variations, Wells would fill only a third or a half of each box, leaving the rest for her co-workers.

They worked eyeball to eyeball, with their arms sometimes touching as they reached for the boxes. But Wells couldn’t speak with many of those around her, not even about personal safety as COVID-19 raced through the warehouse.

Some were Spanish-speaking immigrants, and Wells—who is African American—spoke only English. Others were simply strangers, new arrivals on the line. So many people quit, workers say, that out of the 75 workers in the packing area, only about 15 were still there nine months later.

And as the warehouse wiped away her hope for a better future, she started to dream of joining the exodus.

“When I started, I said I liked this job. I used to tell my mom everything, every day: what I learned and new people who I talked to, new everything,” Wells said during an interview. “But now it’s like, ‘Why do I have to be here? Why do I have to wake up and go?’ And I shouldn’t feel like that.”

Part of the problem was that management wouldn’t defend her as workers argued from time to time over things like who would be next for a bathroom break off the line.

And then there was the agonizing lack of money.

Before applying at Mars, Wells had worked in food service, earning $13 an hour. She saw Mars as a step up since it paid $15.50 and promised steady work, unlike the food business during the pandemic. But it didn’t quite work out that way. For some weeks, when she missed a day or when the packers filled their quotas and got sent home early, she barely took home $300 a week.

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JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

Like almost all the 500 people in the warehouse, Wells didn’t work directly for Mars, the seventh-largest privately owned company in the U.S., according to Forbes. Since its founding in 1911, the company has generated a $137 billion fortune for founding family members, who still control the company, according to Bloomberg. But Wells worked for a temporary staffing company called Staffmark, which in turn had been hired by XPO, one of the country’s largest logistics companies.

Even though Staffmark expected her to show up at Mars every day, she never stopped being classified as a temporary worker. She received no health care, no retirement savings, and no paid sick or vacation time.

The company paid a $3-per-hour bonus during the pandemic, but only for a few weeks.

Wells spent hours each week driving back and forth from her suburban Chicago home to the heart of the nation’s largest inland warehouse center. But she had trouble saving any money. When asked to meet at a family restaurant to talk about her work, she said yes. Then she texted ahead to say she had no money for the meal.

REBECCA WELLS IS not her real name; we use this pseud-

onym to protect her from warehouse managers and staffing agencies who routinely blackball workers who dare to speak out. But she’s a real person, and she’s talking about a plight shared by millions of Americans in the 21st century.

They live and work in the warehouse archipelago, a vast and growing sprawl that extends far beyond Amazon to hundreds of companies that are smaller, less visible, less technologically adept, and more likely to rely on temporary staffing companies for their workers, as a primary way to cut costs and stay competitive.

Unions are few, injuries are high, and workers rarely speak up about the discrimination or problems they face—because they desperately need the work or are undocumented or exconvicts or fear getting blackballed by the staffing companies.

They are mostly Black and Latino, and many are women.

In the 1930s, these workers might have lined up at stockyards, steel mills, and garment factories—vulnerable workers with no rights or promises of a better life. But they rose up and advanced financially, thanks to unions, an activist federal government, and the sustained gusher of postwar economic growth.

Those ladders have disappeared. Today, millions of workers are stuck in the archipelago in a daily battle for low-wage survival. They’re concentrated in vast clusters in Southern California, New Jersey, and the Chicago area, in warehouses that are hollowed-out relics of the nation’s industrial legacy.

“People like to talk about warehousing as a replacement for manufacturing,” says Beth Gutelius, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But it’s not a production function like a factory; it’s a circulation function. It doesn’t create goods, it moves them.”

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Only three states have laws overseeing temporary employment agencies, leaving workers elsewhere prey to wage theft and hazardous conditions.

“The profit margins in warehousing as a circulation activity are very tight, so employers look for ways to cut costs, and labor cost is often the first place they look,” Gutelius continues. “Without power, like the unions that were built in manufacturing, frontline workers are forced to absorb this pressure on profit margins by accepting lower wages and worse working conditions.”

Warehouse work wasn’t always this way. But the rate of unionization of warehouse workers nationwide fell to 6.7 percent in 2018 from 28.1 percent in 1983, government figures show. The drop was due to the fight put up by companies like Amazon this year in Alabama, and in the preceding decades by Walmart, XPO, and others to keep unions out of their newly built suburban warehouses. It was due to unions’ weakened capabilities and repeated failures to mount a broad effort. Temp workers are cheaper than full-time workers, especially full-time union members. It was also due to an increasingly deficient labor law that enabled employers to thwart their workers’ attempts to unionize.

Unionizing those workers is a particular challenge because the jobs are temporary or seasonal, making it difficult to reach or organize them. Nearly 80 percent of the workers hired by staffing companies in Illinois are Black or Latino, according to figures from the state’s Department of Labor.

Four out of five never are hired full-time, according to one study. They may work alongside others who are direct hires and get higher wages for doing the same work.

Their plight is also the result of weak enforcement at the national and local levels. Only three states have comprehensive laws overseeing staffing companies, leaving many workers elsewhere prey to wage theft, discrimination, and unhealthy and hazardous conditions.

Meanwhile, the warehouse sector is booming. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic wiped out millions of jobs, the ranks of warehouse workers have grown. That took place as online sales jumped 44 percent in 2020, the highest such increase in at least two decades.

The archipelago is fed by an endless procession of containers arriving mostly from China aboard ever-larger ships at overcrowded ports that transfer them to two-mile-long trains and massive trucks lumbering around the clock, fouling the

air and clogging highways. As a cluster of largely unmarked warehouses, the archipelago is easy for the public to miss, but it looms steadily larger in the nation’s economy, and in millions of Americans’ lives.

“Focusing on Amazon is OK, but it distracts from the other warehouses,” says Gutelius. “There are also the people who make Weber grills, who brew beer, who sell cosmetics. All of them need warehouses, and because of e-commerce, what’s doing inside them didn’t exist before.”

Nearly 1.5 million people work full-time in U.S. warehouses, a figure that’s more than doubled in the past ten years. But no one knows for sure how many temporary and even full-time workers should be added to this number, because they’re scattered in dozens of other occupational codes the government tracks for retail, packing, and manufacturing. Gutelius estimates the actual number is closer to four million.

Despite all the job growth, inflation-adjusted earnings actually fell in the warehouse industry during the 18 years ending in 2019, Gutelius says. To this insult is added injury: Warehouse workers, she adds, are twice as likely as other workers to get injured on the job.

Irma Mosqueda is one of those casualties. She’d heard plenty of grumbling about unsafe conditions at her suburban Chicago warehouse, but she never saw her bosses address them as they pressed workers to keep the machines going.

She never heard any workers complain to the bosses and didn’t speak up herself.

“I was scared they would fire me,” she says. She was in her mid-fifties, a single parent, and needed the job that paid her $12.40 an hour after five years.

Then one day, her machine had a problem, and she started to move to another. She didn’t see the forklift coming, nor, apparently, did the forklift’s driver see her. The forklift plowed into her, forcing the amputation of her left leg from the hip downward. Three months in the hospital and a changed life followed.

Mosqueda no longer works, nor gets around by herself.

Jose Rivero, her attorney, who won a settlement for Mosqueda in 2019, two years after her accident, cites a video of the accident to explain what happened. “You’ll see forklifts zipping around the place where people are working,” he says.

“I couldn’t believe there wasn’t an accident every second.”

By shifting the burden of compensating injured workers to staffing companies, Rivero says warehouse operators have diminished incentive to fix dangerous conditions.

“We remain incredibly saddened by the unfortunate workplace accident involving Ms. Mosqueda and have taken several additional measures to further enhance our strong safety protocols and underscore the role each associate must play in keeping themselves and their coworkers safe,” said an e-mail reply from LSC Communications, which was taken over by Atlas Holdings in 2020.

The rise of temporary staffing companies began several

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

decades ago when major employers like Walmart started contracting with them to provide workers for their warehouses, even as they hired logistics companies to run those warehouses. This kind of “fissured workplace” reduced labor costs, made the prospect of unionization even more remote, and enabled companies like Walmart to deny responsibility for injuries, for which they’d otherwise be liable.

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, when many employers fired workers who lacked papers showing they were legally in the U.S., staffing companies stepped into the breach.

According to Tim Bell of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, they told employers they could have the same workers back on the job but at the lower pay rates of the agencies.

The fissuring of the warehouse economy accelerated accordingly, and the pay of the people who worked there was reduced, as a lawsuit that involved several Walmart warehouses in Southern California made clear.

The company had hired Schneider Logistics, one of the nation’s largest logistics firms, and Schneider had turned

to two staffing firms to hire the predominantly Latino immigrant workforce. A nearly three-year court battle resulted in a $21 million class action suit settlement in 2014 for the workers.

Under an alleged scheme triggered by the hiring of the staffing companies, according to the workers’ complaint, employees’ wages were lowered. They weren’t paid for overtime work. They also were fired or threatened with retaliation if they inquired about their pay.

Once Walmart’s effort to be dismissed as a defendant

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In 2020, at the pandemic’s peak, OSHA’s warehouse inspections not only didn’t rise with the number of warehouse outbreaks; they dropped by more than a half. was rejected by the court, and it saw that a jury trial would expose its role, Walmart, then the world’s largest company by revenue, agreed to a settlement (as did Schneider). It’s not clear, says Michael Rubin, an attorney for the workers, which company made the payment, since Walmart and Schneider were both sued by the workers. What made the suit unique, according to Rubin, was that it laid out the dealings of the giant retailer, the logistics firm, and the staffing company. “It was a three-tiered joint employer case,” he explained.

Staffing companies have been cited for several questionable strategies. They have been cited for price-fixing and agreeing not to hire from other firms.

Laura Padin, an attorney with the National Employment Law Project, points to other staffing company strategies.

One is their use of the federal Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), which rewards companies for hiring minorities and workers with troubled histories, such as former prison inmates. It can provide more than $6,000 for each worker. The problem with this, she explains, is it doesn’t launch new careers for struggling workers hired under this program. Rather, the staffing companies hire the workers “for a few months in dead-end jobs.” At the same time, staffing companies, operating on low profit margins, rely on the subsidies “to make their money,” she said.

An equally troubling staffing company strategy, experts say, is a conversion fee. Some staffing firms, according to data collected by Temp Worker Justice, charge a potential employer up to $2,000 or 10 percent of a worker’s yearly salary if a company directly hires the worker after several months on the job. “The whole model is built on keeping workers in temp worker conditions,” Padin said.

Dan Shomon, a spokesman for the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, refutes such criticism, saying that agencies want to benefit workers. “Illinois has one of the strongest laws in the country to protect temporary staffing workers,” adds Shomon, whose group represents ten firms that hire lightindustrial workers.

But some of these agencies have had legal problems with Illinois officials. In 2020, three staffing agencies that belong

to the organization were accused in a lawsuit by the Illinois attorney general of colluding to set low wages and agreeing not to “poach” workers from each other. The case is ongoing.

THE NEWS ABOUT worker shortages and rising wages at companies with the reopening of the economy may suggest new hopes for warehouse workers. Indeed, at a new warehouse in Joliet, Harbor Freight Tools will pay $19.50 an hour, says Doug Pryor, vice president of the Will County Center for Economic Development. Wages are also rising at small warehouses that rely on temporary workers, he adds.

Beth Gutelius agrees that labor shortages might finally be reversing the wage stagnation that has plagued both temporary and permanent warehouse workers in the U.S. for 20 years. The average wage for a warehouse worker in June 2021, according to one wage-tracking firm, was $12.81 an hour—not a lot to feed a family on.

But the pay gap between full-time workers and temps won’t disappear entirely. In the end, Gutelius predicts, rising wages may mean that employers will turn even more to temporary workers.

Moreover, companies that rely on warehouses are still encouraging turnover. In Amazon’s case, the churn rate has reached 150 percent per year, according to The New York Times. For longtime workers—those who stay more than three years—Amazon stops giving annual pay raises and offers a $1,000 bonus if they leave, according to Bloomberg.

Amazon also recently closed a Chicago warehouse where workers had staged a series of protests during the pandemic.

The anti-union tactics Amazon used to block an organizing drive by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in Bessemer, Alabama, are employed widely across the industry. The mammoth company now faces another, and larger, potential challenge from the Teamsters union, which has created a division to organize Amazon and urged its members to back an all-out national effort.

But regaining a foothold among warehouse workers and drivers serving the warehouses has proved to be difficult for the 1.2 million member union. Employers’ determination to resist unions at all costs—a determination abetted by the inadequacies of labor law—are a potent obstacle to unionization. Teamsters union officials say that until recently five XPO facilities had voted to join their union, but none had contracts.

But in July, workers at XPO facilities in Miami and Trenton, New Jersey, finally won contracts with the company, six years and four years, respectively, after voting to become Teamsters.

At the same time, workers at several XPO locations, where contract bargaining was going nowhere, have voted the union out. These efforts have been supported by the National Right to Work Foundation, according to news reports.

XPO offered this take on unions’ lack of success at its U.S. facilities in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “As of December 31, 2020, 75.8% of our employees

in Europe were represented by unions or other employee representative bodies, while almost all of our employees in the United States have chosen to remain union-free,” the company said. Out of 35,000 employees in the U.S., unions represent just 231 XPO employees, among them workers at a small Indiana facility recently organized by the Machinists Union, according to an XPO official.

A likely reason for unions’ failure has been XPO’s resistance. Between 2014 and 2018, the firm racked up 120 unfair labor charges with the National Labor Relations Board, according to an extensive 2020 report on the firm by unions in the U.S. and globally.

The report cited a statement from the company ’s employee handbook: “It is the company’s position that it can best achieve a competitive position in the transportation and logistics industries by remaining union-free. XPO will do everything legally possible to remain in that position and to convince the company’s employees that they have no need for representation by an outside party.”

XPO Logistics, Inc., has paid over $47 million in fines, penalties, and court cases for employment-related issues since 2000, according to Violation Tracker, a research tool of Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C., organization that promotes government and business accountability. Despite unions’ complaints, an XPO official told us that the company “respects the right of every employee to choose or decline union membership.”

How to account for the company’s success at thwarting unionization in the U.S., while more than three-quarters of its European workforce is unionized? It’s not that XPO supports unionization there while opposing it here, or that the issues American workers confront are wholly different from those in Europe. In large part, it’s because the tactics XPO uses to defeat unions in the U.S. are forbidden by European laws, while American labor law imposes no serious penalties for the same offenses.

XPO’s business, meanwhile, is booming, with a 24 percent increase in revenue for the three months ending in March over the first quarter of last year, and a 40 percent increase in its share price for the first half of 2021. XPO recently said it would be splitting its trucking and logistics operations into two separate companies.

THE PANDEMIC brought a burst of scrutiny to the archipelago.

Warehouses and factories were second only to nursing homes in COVID cases reported in Illinois, according to a January 2021 report by Warehouse Workers for Justice and the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative. At least 165 outbreaks occurred in ware-

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 55

houses, factories, and food service facilities, the report said.

But workers’ pleas for help got limited support nationally from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) during the Trump administration (a situation that the new administration has promised to fix). According to figures for 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, OSHA’s warehouse inspections across the U.S. not only didn’t rise with the number of warehouse outbreaks; they actually dropped by more than a half, falling to 100, the lowest number in over a decade. Total fines fell by 61 percent from the previous year, according to Good Jobs First.

Oscar (not his real name) worked in a small 200-person combination factory/warehouse in southern Wisconsin. Most of the workers were Latina. “The money I was getting was not enough to live on, but to survive,” he says.

When he fell sick with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, he had no medical benefits and no financial help from the staffing company. He knew about 15 of his fellow workers who had caught the virus, and one, a 55-year-old friend, had died. Despite that, he doesn’t recall the company talking about sick workers.

The company fired him soon after the virus struck him.

After 20 years in the warehouses, always working for staffing companies, he had no money, and no support to help him get by.

A small hospital in a northern Chicago suburb took him as a charity patient to help him deal with the virus. But he had to leave after a month, although he hadn’t fully recovered. He avoided taking a bath or doing anything physical for weeks afterward because his lungs hurt him so much. Out of work for months, he could not pay rent and then found a room in a nearby house. “I’m afraid,” he said, soon after leaving the hospital. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have trouble breathing.”

He eventually found a new job: doing lighter work through a staffing company.

Oscar’s warehouse was just one of many where management downplayed the pandemic. At the 1.4 million square foot warehouse that Mars opened in Joliet in 2017, a mammoth building 29 times the size of a football field, COVID-19 was racing through the workforce.

The Mars building is in a cluster of warehouses surrounding Joliet, 35 miles southwest of Chicago. Mothballed factories and steel mills dot the area. But the area is growing as a warehouse mecca that links more than 70 million people in the Upper Midwest to rail lines that run straight to California ports where container ships constantly arrive from China.

The two-mile-long trains run back and forth along these lines every 20 minutes, every day of the year.

Mark Balentine worked on the candy-packing line in the Mars warehouse and is still angry about not being informed that one of his co-workers had tested positive. “I was bumping into her, my sweat into her sweat, and when I asked about not being informed, they said I was a troublemaker,” says Balentine, who later quit and is now an organizer for Warehouse Workers for Justice in Illinois.

The lack of information posed unique problems for Ryan

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Warehouse worker unionization fell from 28 percent in 1983 to 6.7 percent in 2018, due chiefly to opposition from employers like Amazon.

Johnson, one of the warehouse’s forklift drivers. He has diabetes and high blood pressure. His wife has rheumatoid arthritis; his sister-in-law, who lives with them, has multiple sclerosis; and his son has a heart condition.

“When I come home from work, the first thing I do is strip down and take a shower,” Johnson said in an interview last year. All the clothes I’m wearing go into the washing machine.

All the jewelry I’m wearing, all the rings and everything, comes off and gets disinfected. My wife has clean clothes waiting.”

As the pandemic gained steam, 100 Mars workers—20 percent of the warehouse staff—signed a petition demanding hazard and quarantine pay and more and better protective equipment. They staged a protest at the company’s research center on Goose Island in Chicago in September.

Johnson was one of four Mars workers who spoke during their COVID-19 protest. Three had already been fired; in December, Johnson was fired, too. Despite requests, Mars did not offer a reply to the issues he raised.

Ronald Jackson is another protestor who was fired. He was ostensibly let go for refusing to open a box, but claimed his temporary staffing company, CoWorx Staffing Services, provided no written documentation of his alleged offense.

The staffing company did not reply to a request for comment.

Jackson says he was actually fired for speaking out on safety problems, even though labor laws protect this kind of speech. He filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The board ruled that the company had indeed used threatening language but refused to order back pay or reinstatement, according to documents provided by Jackson.

After getting fired at Mars, Jackson refused an offer by CoWorx for a temporary job at another warehouse paying $12. “I didn’t refuse work, but I refuse to be treated like a slave,” Johnson says.

For Jackson, the fight for workers’ rights is a direct extension of the Black Lives Matter protests that raged across the U.S. last summer.

“Let’s be real,” he says. “If this were a white issue, with a white workforce, safety would be no issue at all. Precautions would be taken.”

PRESIDENT BIDEN seems more inclined than either of

his two Democratic predecessors to regard unions as part of the bedrock of his political base, says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

But for now, hefty campaign contributions mean the primarily white, unionized electricians getting paid $80 an hour to build a warehouse wield far more clout in the Democratic Party than the Black and brown unorganized workers who work in warehouses and make just $15, says Roberto Clack, director of the Warehouse Workers for Justice in Joliet.

Born out of workers’ complaints, lawsuits, political pressure, and worker advocacy groups, experts say, Illinois has the nation’s strongest law protecting warehouse workers. But Tim Bell of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative says it’s not been enough.

“Enforcement comes from worker complaints and [workers] are terrified of complaining,” he says.

What are the solutions?

Only three states—Illinois, California, and Massachusetts— have comprehensive laws. So what should stronger laws do?

How can they address warehouse workers’ multiple plights?

Workers need protections against discrimination because of race and gender. State agencies should track staffing agencies’ hiring to signal any abuses and abusive patterns.

Workers need to be provided with safe equipment, clothing, and training by the staffing agencies and host companies.

Warehouse workers suffer high rates of injuries on hazardous jobs. And because of crowded warehouse conditions, they faced high rates of exposure to the COVID virus at the peak of the outbreak.

Workers need to be given training for long-term skills and the chance for long-term jobs when openings come up. This will reduce the slotting of workers permanently into lowwage, low-skill jobs.

Workers should know their basic rights. In a time of fissured workplaces, they should know who they are working for: what staffing agency, who provides workers’ compensation, what their hours are, and the length of their assignments.

State and federal safety agencies should increase their inspections of warehouses heavily staffed by temporary workers. Workers should also be protected against retaliation by firing with state laws that protect whistleblowers.

Workers need a voice on the job, and this can come from worker advocacy groups or unions. The shrinkage of union presence in warehouses, and companies’ resistance to unions, promotes a silenced workforce. Federal labor law needs a wholesale rewrite, so that workers can form unions to give them a share of power in their workplace, without fear of being fired.

Workers need state and federal agencies to crack down on the misclassification violations that are actually at the core of the warehouse industry’s business model, in which full-time workers are mislabeled as temps, underpaid,

deprived of benefits, and shunted off to staffing agencies.

For now, such reforms seem a distant possibility for workers like Rebecca Wells, the Mars candy packer.

When she first arrived at the warehouse, she was assigned to the same packing lines on which Ronald Jackson and Mark Balentine had previously worked. But she heard no discussion of how they and other workers had staged a COVID-19 safety protest. It was as if they’d never existed.

As she settled into her job, Wells learned to block any distractions so she could keep up. At times, she even preferred to work in total silence. “The speed of the belt,” she said. “That’s what I concentrate on.”

But the work has continued to grind her down. Workers worried for weeks that they’d face a pay cut when Mars dropped XPO and hired another logistics provider, DHL Supply Chain, to run the entire warehouse. They found out only after the fact that DHL had decided to stick with Staffmark and make no change in its pay scale for temporary workers.

In response to queries, a DHL official defended the firm’s COVID-19 precautions and added that the NLRB had dismissed Mars workers’ claims of retaliatory dismissals. So did a Staffmark official, who said the firm followed CDC guidelines, but would not comment further.

Wel l s s t a r t e d applying for jobs closer to her home.

It w a s a w ay to buy time to think about her next steps. She debates continually with family members about moving, but one wants to go to Alabama and another to Texas.

There’s anguish in her voice as she mulls over her future. And in that anguish is a reminder of how much Chicago has lost, even as it remains one of the world’s great crossroads for moving freight. Chicago was once a promised land that attracted millions of Black and brown migrants because it offered a shot at a better life. But for Wells and thousands like her, Chicago has become just another island in the warehouse archipelago. n John Lippert was a line worker for eight years at General Motors before becoming a reporter at the Detroit Free Press and then Bloomberg, where he was a senior writer. Stephen Franklin was the longtime labor reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

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Lawful Carnage Scholar Samuel Moyn and journalist Spencer Ackerman consider the inherent contradictions of the endless war on terrorism.

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ooking back, the war against terrorism was designed to be a forever war. Two months after George Bush launched the global “war on terror,” the United States– led coalition had wrested control of most of the country of Afghanistan from the Taliban government, and had killed a top al-Qaeda military commander in a bombing raid. Not long after, hundreds of Taliban soldiers across Afghanistan laid down their weapons, and their leader Mullah Omar agreed to surrender the group’s stronghold Kandahar to the local tribes. The Taliban had effectively handed the country to

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America. Yet none of this appeased Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He rejected the capitulation and called a “negotiated end” to the conflict “unacceptable to the United States.”

Over the next 20 years, the U.S. would go on to spend nearly a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, over 2,400 American forces would die, and some 20,600 others would come home injured. More than 66,000 Afghan military and police would be killed, and countless more civilians would be dead. The U.S. will leave Afghanistan this year, with no certainty that the Taliban, which has been

advancing across the country, won’t seize Kabul once again.

Yet none of these tragedies— from the rejection of surrender in Afghanistan to around one million civilians killed in the war on terror—constitutes a crime, even if it violates our moral sensibilities. This is not because the United States acted with impunity after the 9/11 attacks; to the contrary, the Bush administration repeatedly pointed to the Constitution and international law to legitimate its wars. His successor, a constitutional lawyer, did the same; Barack Obama even used law to justify the assassination of a U.S. citizen, Anwar Al-Awlaki, and his 16-year-old son. Donald Trump called himself an “anti-war” president as he turned to existing laws to accelerate bombing in Afghanistan, which increased civilian casualties by 330 percent.

From the beginning, the carnage of the war on terror has proceeded lawfully. Every administration has

ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS / AP PHOTO

From the beginning, the carnage of the war on terror has proceeded lawfully.

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argued that they have been accountable to the law—and by most interpretations, they have been right. But if there have been no war criminals, it’s because every administration has relied on the American public’s fundamentally misplaced assumptions about the nobility of law. Law may be meant to restrain warfare and protect civilians, but, it turns out, law could also be used to perpetuate oppression.

Two recent books, Humane by the legal scholar Samuel Moyn and Reign of Terror by the journalist Spencer Ackerman, consider how the cloak of legality has allowed the United States to continue one of the longest, and most immoral, wars in its history. Both are driven by an abiding concern: How did we arrive at a place where America continues to fight a failing war on terror that has damaged the world and itself and, perhaps, destroyed once and for all our claim to moral authority?

MOYN TRACES an “anti-war history of the laws of war” by looking at how law has transformed not only the idea of war, but also the idea of peace.

He begins in the mid-1800s when prominent pacifists, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy, lobbied for an abolition of war over merely reforming warfare. But the debate was lost, as no state could be convinced that a world without war was possible.

With abolition a dead letter, Western countries intensified efforts to humanize war. What followed was a century and a half of legal debates and global treaties to adopt restraints on aggressive actions, and ensure the rights of wounded combatants and civilians. But even attempts to arbitrate conflict in the hopes of reducing harm and moving toward peace had exceptions: The “right to go to war” was allowed in the name of self-defense; states agreed to sign treaties only on loose conditions; insurgencies did not fall neatly under the rules of combat between nation-states and were considered the “internal matters” of empires, which effectively authorized states to kill and maim civilians in Africa and Asia. For decades, there were no widely agreed-upon

REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP

BY SPENCER ACKERMAN

Penguin Random House

HUMANE: HOW THE UNITED STATES ABANDONED PEACE AND REINVENTED WAR

BY SAMUEL MOYN

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

rules about air weapons; thus, the apocalyptic bombing of cities across Europe and the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki went unpunished by the international community.

But there have been drastic transformations. Moyn lays out three significant turns after World War II that profoundly shaped how we conceptualize wars today. The first was that, for the United States, the Cold War shifted the goal of war: The purpose of armed conflict was no longer to achieve only peace, but also to bring “freedom.” The second was the atrocities of the Vietnam War, which shocked public sentiment, and led the debate on the war to become fixated on America’s conduct in combat, not the propriety of the war itself. As a result, international humanitarian law, which was concerned with regulating armed conflict, not abolishing it, emerged as an important force in shaping the public’s thinking about war. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre so troubled America’s moral conscience that the U.S. military and government moved to codify their own rules to humanize war (it was, after all, better to work with the reformers than the abolitionists). By the first Gulf War in the 1990s, teams of lawyers were vetting airstrikes for approval and had become an essential part of conducting modern warfare.

The third significant shift happened around this time: The U.S. government convinced the public that it could serve as a “good policeman” around the world. A mix of factors led to this reorientation, including the success of the Gulf War, a greater focus on victims of conflict, and growing concern about violence in newly decolonized territories. As Moyn notes, “more than 80 percent of all U.S. military interventions abroad since 1946 came after 1989.”

By September 2001, the government and public’s view of warfare was now wholly concerned with the legality of its conduct, not with the legality—or morality—of launching wars in the first place. The result is that American wars no longer shock or awe us; instead, by becoming “lawful wars,” they recede from our attention, and

no longer demand our outrage.

While Moyn offers a sorely needed history of how war has become palatable, Ackerman looks, in chilling detail, at how the war on terror became endless. In this endless war, the aim was less to eradicate any specific enemy for the sake of peace, but rather to wage war against abstract ideas, like “extremism.” In one passage about the decision-making that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he describes how in March 2003 the CIA had recommended an airstrike on a camp in Iraq to kill Abu Musab Zarqawi, the infamous al-Qaeda commander. The Bush administration rejected it. Killing him prior to the invasion would undermine their justification for war against Saddam Hussein.

Such details have been largely forgotten. For the public, the original sin of Bush’s war on terror was not the start of the war itself, but the atrocities that marked its initial years: hog-tying of Guantanamo detainees, including a 15-year-old boy, and torture of suspects at secret black sites, including, in one instance, a pregnant wife. The U.S. adopted its own standards of legality, declaring its actions to be legal or constitutional, even if they contradicted the United Nations’ standards of humane conduct in war. White House attorney John Yoo defined the legal threshold for torture in his now notorious memo that determined the U.S. could use “enhanced interrogation” against alQaeda and Taliban detainees.

The revelations of massacres of civilians at the hands of U.S. soldiers and contractors, and torture at the prison of Abu Ghraib, only entrenched the U.S. further in conflict. These atrocities were kinks, however unfortunate, in an otherwise good war. The political establishment and the military drew the conclusion not to end the war, but to salvage it.

REIGN OF TERROR is organized into chapters that analyze the relationship between the war on terror and conservatives, the right, and liberals—finding that each group, whatever its criticisms of the war, has found reason to sustain and even expand it. The fact that the enemy

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(extremism) and the goal (freedom) were so abstract helped these various poles of the political spectrum define and redefine the enemy to suit their purpose. It’s part of the story of how the nativist current, which Trump encouraged, ultimately decided it was immigrants and Muslims who were the existential threat the U.S. faced.

Ackerman, though, is just as scathing of Obama, who convinced much of the liberal elite and the broader public that the Democrats were waging a better, more just war than the Bush administration. When the confusing and panicked years of the 9/11 era could no longer explain the nebulous legal justifications for secret renditions abroad or mass detentions at home, fresh policies and promises that America would adhere closely to the law characterized the new face of war. Targeted drone strikes became a “humane” alternative to the messy invasion of Iraq, even as airpower launched us into dozens more countries; NSA monitoring with new amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act offered a more “palatable” option to the hasty mass surveillance of the Bush years; continued prosecutions of terrorism suspects were touted as more “just” than detention of immigrants without charges, even if the arrests were based on use of informants and manufactured threats.

The war on terror was merely reoriented, not stopped. The administration even found justifications to keep Guantanamo open. “The civil libertarians had hoped Obama would finally make the War on Terror respect the law,” Ackerman writes.

“They watched in disbelief as Obama continued to make the law respect the War on Terror.”

The brilliance of Moyn’s and Ackerman’s books is in how they wrest control of the dominant narratives that have gripped the public imagination in the post-9/11 years, and in particular, the country after Trump.

Moyn shows that war, as natural as it may seem, was not always widely accepted as such. In 1944, a New York Times editorial noted: “Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that war can be made more humane.

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The story of war isn’t just a story about law. It’s also a story about the absence of peace.

It cannot. It can only be abolished.”

World War II wasn’t the war for freedom, as Bush and Obama characterized it. The United States’ (and the Soviet Union’s) casus belli was that Hitler had committed a “crime of aggression”; that is, he started a war.

Today, though, debates over the legal and moral justifications for launching wars have largely faded. Moyn astutely observes, “Much greater suffering was visited on more people through illegal war than illegal war crimes—in part because so much is legal once war starts.” What has resulted, Ackerman notes, is that those who had been responsible for the atrocities that once shocked us continue to enjoy a long political life: Gina Haspel, who oversaw torture at a black site in Thailand, became director of the CIA in 2018. The agencies that perpetuated waterboarding, detention, and surveillance sided with the #Resistance to Trump.

There has been little incentive to stop the war on terrorism—not the drain on the public purse, the civilian deaths, the destruction of entire cities, the scandals of torture, nor the underlying immorality. Instead, the Biden administration only appears to be winding down the “forever war” simply due to fatigue. Yet the same lasting assumptions, like that the U.S. is a “good policeman,” underlie the administration’s pivot to Asia and the rising tensions with China.

Taken together, the conclusions of Humane and Reign of Terror are discomfiting, because they point to our profound failure in articulating a vision for the type of world we want to live in. Despite thinkers like Michael Walzer who believed that restraining war through rules is “the

beginning of peace,” Moyn posits an unsettling truth: Humanizing war doesn’t necessitate peace. What then, one might ask, is the point of making war lawful? And even if one takes Walzer’s position, his hope rests on a flawed assumption: Today, the U.S. isn’t in the business of peace. It is in the business of freedom, a goal so nebulous and immeasurable that we can never know when it might be achieved. This allows the U.S., armed with the law, to mete out “justice” in perpetuity.

The story of war, though, isn’t just a story about law. It’s also a story about the absence of peace. Moyn emphasizes that conflict has been normalized as the anti-war movement has dissipated. Though the Iraq War protests were the largest anti-war demonstrations in history, there were hardly any protests when the war on terror was launched in 2001. Today, we have far more organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty doing the critical work of decrying conduct than we have thinkers and organizations doing the equally critical work of questioning the very use of war itself.

Historically, the reforms that have been adopted to make war more humane have not been born from the goodwill of states or the elite or the military. They were adopted due to fears of public relations fiascos, persistent pressure from anti-war movements, and whistleblowers who leaked images and details about atrocities in our name. It is no coincidence that these elements of civic life have also become criminalized over the past 20 years. Activists are surveilled, journalists’ records are subpoenaed, whistleblowers are tried, protestors are jailed. Lawfully.

The Afghanistan War may be ending, but the age of war drones on.

We may not be barreling cities with bombs anymore, but inflicting law and order at home and around the world, it turns out, still results in physical and moral carnage. The U.S. has brought no peace, and no freedom, and thus we continue. n Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center.

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Hollywood’s Uprising of Activism While conventional wisdom suggests that the arts have been depoliticized relative to the 1960s, there’s been a surge of celebrity engagement since the Trump years.

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Brendan Gleeson portrays Donald Trump in Showtime’s The Comey Rule, directed by Billy Ray.

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egardless of what the recently convened House select committee ends up conveying to the public about January 6th, Hollywood is already on it. Last year, Billy Ray wrote and directed The Comey Rule, a two-episode miniseries based on the former FBI director’s memoir that featured the first full dramatization of Donald Trump as president, in a memorable portrayal by Brendan Gleeson. The day after the insurrection, Ray approached Showtime with an idea for a film about Ashli

Babbitt, the pro-Trump protester who had been killed after invading the Capitol.

Showtime and Ray decided to widen the focus, and the currently untitled “Jan 6th series” will consist of six one-hour episodes about the insurrection. Shooting begins in January, and it will be broadcast before the midterm elections. The main characters will be three to four insurrectionists, three to four cops. and one member of Congress (no casting yet).

Ray, whose credits include the screenplay of The Hunger Games, told me, “It’s the obligation of people who can get things made to make things that reflect America back to itself, that paint an accurate portrait of where we are as a country.”

In an era when conventional news media reach a fraction of America’s voting population, alternative populist messengers play an outsized role in shaping public opinion. Rightwing propagandists have a pipeline into most of the talk radio audience, and Trumpists like Ben Shapiro and Franklin Graham dominate the daily list of top ten Facebook posts. The left still dominates in show business.

Although there are a few Trumpist entertainers like Kid Rock, most artists are progressive, and the singers, writers, actors, producers, and directors who became part of the resistance to Trump have stayed engaged in America’s political conversation.

That is upending a familiar trope in recent decades, asserting that art has become depoliticized relative to the activism of the past.

Baby boomers like to romanticize the role of popular music in the movement against the Vietnam War. As Jimmy Iovine observes in the Apple miniseries 1971, The Year That Music Changed Everything, songs like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” served as a “Trojan horse” in which anti-war ideas were delivered by addictive melodies and rhythms. And it’s true that many artists spoke out on civil rights, Vietnam, and other hot-button issues.

Yet even in that storied era, activist artists like Gaye, John Lennon, and Eartha Kitt were the exception. In the Trump era, they were the rule.

When Jon Stewart began hosting The Daily Show in 1999, it was the only weeknight program in which the comedy revolved around politics. After Trump became president, every show, every night, followed this model. Before Trump, pop divas like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston rarely alluded to political issues or elections. With Trump in the political mix, Cardi B, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish were among dozens of outspoken stars. Before Trump, most show business activism came from a small group of “usual suspects.” After 2016,

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Demi Lovato, who identifies

stars like Robert De Niro and Jim Carrey, who previously had mostly kept their political views to themselves, became obsessively engaged.

Many of them still are.

In recent months, Bruce Spring­ steen announced that only fully vaccinated fans can attend the revival of his Broadway show, and other performers have followed suit.

Matthew McConaughey, who won an Oscar for his role in Dallas Buyers Club, is flirting with a run for Texas governor, and Alyssa Milano, who starred in Who’s the Boss and Charmed, recently told The Hill that she is considering running for the House seat in California’s Fourth District, currently held by a Republican. (Milano’s Sorry Not Sorry podcast featured Joe Biden as one of her first guests.)

Even seemingly unremarkable actions generate strong pushback from artists. A video shot backstage at Trump’s rally before the Capitol Riot featured Donald Trump Jr. dancing to the late Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” A spokesman for Branigan’s estate was appalled. Trump rallies have also repeatedly used Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” even after John Fogerty

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pointed out that his lyric is an indictment of people like Trump who used wealth to avoid serving in the Army during the Vietnam War. THERE IS A difference between ideological art and celebrity activism, but both reach millions of people whose minds are otherwise inaccessible to conventional political communication. And conservatives know this. Republican strategists target progressive Hollywood today for the same reason that their counterparts in the McCarthy period fostered the Hollywood blacklist.

Entertainment is one of the few forces that can express progressive ideas in an accessible, emotional language.

So they have sought to place the views of people in the arts outside the political conversation.

The methods are often extreme.

It is no accident that QAnon’s imagined conspiracy of child abusers includes performers like Tom Hanks. John Legend, who with his wife Chrissy Teigen is demonized by QAnon, told me, “There’s a reason why they accuse the worst enemies of that kind of thing … if you can accuse someone of that and believe that they are actually doing it, then

Demi Lovato, who identifies as nonbinary, has recently taken a more activist approach to their life and career.

you can justify all kinds of behavior toward them.”

More often, the complaints blame artists for provoking conservative radicalism, or for having a point of view. Trumpy Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) complained that The Lego Movie was “insidious” anti-business “propaganda.” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote the book Shut Up & Sing, which belittled activist artists. In 2020, she broadcast a piece attacking Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody for their homemade videos on social media that supported Democrats. (In June, Patinkin joined the cast of the highly entertaining and palpably anti-Trump series The Good Fight.)

Before casting his vote against impeachment in January, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said that some who vandalized the Capitol were motivated by resentment of “the socialists in Hollywood … Robert De Niro said that he wanted to punch the president in the face. Madonna thought about blowing up the White House. Kathy Lee Griffin [sic] held up a likeness of the president’s beheaded head.”

Andrew Breitbart famously said that “politics is downstream from culture,” and Breitbart News has a daily “entertainment” section that highlights the outrages du jour from a Trumpist point of view. The usual Breitbart fare that warns about liberal initiatives often gets paired with stories of how “left-wing Hollywood elites” support them. When Joy Behar was asked if she planned to retire from The View, she quipped that she wouldn’t “because I am a job creator over at Breitbart.”

This demonization works on those who believe anything right-wing media feeds them. A YouGov poll of a thousand Trump voters taken after the 2020 election ranked groups by “temperature,” with zero to 20 signifying those whom they liked the least. “Hollywood actors and actresses” were viewed in that most negative category by 59 percent, more than “Illegal immigrants” (57 percent), “Feminists” (43 percent), or “Muslim” (30 percent).

Right-wingers, of course, embrace the aura of Hollywood when it suits

BRENT N. CLARKE / INVISION / AP

CULTURE

CULTURE.

their ideological purposes. The two Republican presidents with show business backgrounds, Trump and Ronald Reagan, were not anomalies, but products of a political mindset that saw entertainment as one of the levers that generated populist political power. Lee Atwater, who managed George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign, told Ron Brownstein, “I became very infatuated with the notion of American culture and how it is connected to politics. Aside from The Apprentice, Trump polished his pre-presidential celebrity halo in cameos in Home Alone 2, Zoolander, and Two Weeks Notice, and episodes of Sex and the City, Suddenly Susan, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (in which the character Hilary Banks, played by Karyn Parsons, gushed, “You look much richer in person.”).

Perhaps as a by-product of the sustained conservative campaign, many liberal pundits have mixed feelings about showbiz activism. Some progressives worry that showbiz activists are merely “preaching to the choir,” repeating feel-good bromides to audiences that already agree with them. But when the primary agenda of modern campaigns is to turn out the base, performers who have their own fan bases can help to motivate some of those who are on the fence about voting.

Artists can use showbiz tools to help broaden popular sentiment on some issues, such as Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom’s recent clip sending a message from the future, stressing the centrality of voting rights.

Moreover, as MSNBC’s Ari Melber says, artists can “bring saliency to issues that would otherwise be ignored.” In the decades before Black Lives Matter, hip-hop artists focused the attention of their vast multiracial audience on police killings of unarmed African Americans.

During the years when most Democratic politicians felt it was politically unsafe to publicly support gay rights, dozens of films and TV shows and Hollywood advocacy groups helped change public opinion enough for President Obama to “evolve” on the subject of gay marriage in his second term. President Biden has repeatedly

credited shows like Ellen and Will & Grace for the transformation.

LIKE THE REST of the coalition that elected Biden, the anti-fascist entertainment community is not monolithic. Billy Ray, who has consulted on dozens of Democratic congressional campaigns, is a passionate centrist. But the center of gravity of the entertainment community writ large is closer to AOC than it is to Biden. Unlike politicians who need 50 percent of the vote, or broadcasters who are dependent on daily ratings, artists are only accountable to their own fans and consciences.

And the entertainment community is highly responsive to young people, who are much more progressive than their elders.

Activist artists, while intertwined with conventional political forces, play a different role and often diverge from the current Democratic talking points. In the spring of 2021, Bette Midler tweeted, “What is wrong with @Sen_JoeManchin? Some Democrat. Such muddy thinking, and no foresight. He simply cannot see the calamity riding over the hill with his no-votes and filibuster support.” Rob Reiner weighed in: “If Merrick Garland is unwilling to prosecute Donald Trump for Obstruction of Justice, inciting a deadly attack to overthrow the Government, and countless other crimes, the Rule of Law is meaningless and Democracy is a sham.”

On The View, Behar asked Superstore star America Ferrera about Kamala Harris’s comment “do not come” to those who were thinking of trying to cross the border between Mexico and the U.S. Ferrera responded with “extreme disappointment and confusion … I have spent many years sitting in shelters, detention centers on this side of the border and on the other side of the border … hearing the stories of the violent and life-threatening circumstances they’re fleeing.”

Renegades, the recent eight-part podcast of conversations between Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, revealed some subtle differences between the Boss and the former president. When discussing the athlete whose social conscience

had most inspired them, Springsteen cited Muhammad Ali, who clashed with governments of both parties over the Vietnam War, while Obama chose Jackie Robinson, a Republican political activist.

Meanwhile, a half-century after emerging as an anti-war activist, Jane Fonda is still a thought leader to her fans. In the summer of 2019, the actress was inspired by Naomi Klein’s book On Fire to create “Fire Drill Fridays” protests in D.C. to focus on climate change. After the pandemic hit, Fonda went virtual in 60 YouTube conversations that reached more than nine million people.

This June, Fonda interviewed 28-year-old pop superstar Demi Lovato. A few weeks earlier, the singer had premiered their new podcast, 4D With Demi Lovato, where they announced that they identify as nonbinary and changed their pronouns to “they/them.”

Lovato became an overnight star in 2009 as the title character in the Disney Channel’s Sonny With a Chance. Lovato told Fonda, “When I became famous, activism wasn’t something 15-year-olds were getting into, but when I talked about being bullied, many fans said they were too.”

Last year, the singer was devastated by the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, the 25-year-old African American man who was murdered by white racists while jogging in his native Georgia. “I was up crying and decided I wanted to take more of an activist approach to my life and career,” Lovato said.

Rather than being inhibited by the ghosts of conventional wisdom past or gaslighted by the likes of Breitbart into keeping their distance, Democrats should embrace the fact that voices such as Lovato, who claims more than 100 million followers on social media, are part of the coalition needed to keep the dark forces at bay in 2022 and beyond. n Danny Goldberg’s next book, Bloody Crossroads 2020: Art, Entertainment, and Resistance to Trump, will be published by Akashic Books in November.

JUL /AUG 2021 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 63

Parting shot

The Final Rumsfeld Memos Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who passed away on June 29, was famous for authoring “snowflakes”— terse, one-page memos he sent while running the Pentagon

TO:

Senior Staff

FROM:

under two presidents. He would often send as many as 60 snowflakes a day. The Prospect has exclusively unearthed Rumsfeld’s final memos.—Prospect Staff

June 29, 2021

9:21 AM

Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT:

Obituary

The word “obituary” is a strange word. It alwa ys looks like I spelled it wrong. Also, it smacks of finality, which I am uncomfortable with.

Let’s visit about this.

10:26 AM June 29, 2021

Senior Staff TO: FROM: SUBJECT:

Donald Rumsfeld The afterlife

l.

The challenges here are not unusua to it and what we don’t know. We ought ut abo w kno we t wha w kno to d nee We the good ngs that can happen, and what are think through what are the bad thi to be ready for. things that can happen that I need Please give a list of each.

12:04 PM June 29, 2021

Senior Staff TO: Donald Rumsfeld FROM: Will d it.

SUBJECT: ould be able to fin sh u Yo . fe sa e th and north it out of east, west, south, Make sure they take d, da gh Ba d an it kr ound Ti It’s in the area ar somewhat.

TO:

Senior Staff

FROM:

Donald Rumsfeld

SUBJECT:

June 29, 2021

2:55 PM

Funeral

I typically stand for eight hours a day at my desk, I don’t know why I have to lie down for eternity!

64 PROSPECT.ORG JUL /AUG 2021

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A safetoand welcoming Back School for All: school for all Return,year Recover and Reimagine By ByRandi RandiWeingarten, Weingarten,President President AMERICAN AMERICANFEDERATION FEDERATIONOF OFTEACHERS TEACHERS

RS

eaders of a certain age will get it when I say chools must absolutely open this fall.

In person. that teachers MacGyvered the last Five days a week.

With the and to 16 months. For everyone else, space I’m referring health to do so. And mywhat the wayssafeguards educators improvised using theand American Federation of they had union, on hand, their ingenuity, to complete their mission—educating connecting with their Teachers, is committed toand making it happen. students during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

If the bathrooms at their child’s school lacked soap Here are ideas toormove us towardwas those goals: before the 10 pandemic the ventilation poor, it’s an even greater concern now. Their children 1. Launch the AFT’s “Back to School for Everyone” may be too young or unable to be vaccinated. And national campaign to underscore the importance some people worry about the safety of vaccines.

of in-school learning.

Some concerns have nothing to do withofCOVID-19.

2. Form school-based committees staff, parents Parents whose children have been bullied;tohave and, where appropriate, students plan for and experienced racism, antisemitism or anti-Asian respond to safety issues and to conduct safety bigotry; or have not been well-served academically, “walk-throughs” in school buildings. may see remote learning as a refuge.

School is where children learn best, where they play Educators the first responders to students’ together, have form been relationships and learn resilience.

It’s needs—troubleshooting technological where many children who otherwiseproblems; might go hungry tending to students’ emotional needs; eat breakfast and lunch.

Parents relyand on helping schools not them through the hurdles of online, hybrid and only to educate their kids but so they can work. An in-person learning. And that can take a toll. astounding 3 million mothers dropped out of the Inworkforce a recent survey, of teachers reported during78 thepercent pandemic.

3. Align health and pedagogical best practices by

class we sizes to reflect the The Centers for These reducing are all barriers must overcome.

AFT is Disease dedicating $5 million to a Back to School Control and Prevention’s 3-feet social for Alldistancing campaign, guidance. with members reaching out to Eliminate simultaneous families to stressand the importance of in-school in-person remote instruction. learning and“office build families’ confidence 4. Offer hours”trust and and clinics for AFT in theiraffiliates children and returning to to school. others discuss ideas and get

frequent job-related stress—almost twice as many as The United States will notduring be fully until we are most other working adults theback pandemic.

And fully back in school.

And my union is all-in.

I recently teachers were nearly three times as likely to experience gave a speech detailingasthe necessary to return symptoms of depression thesteps general adult population.

technical support.

The AFT has already made more than 40 grants to 5. and Rolllocal out camps summer that state unions and totaling moreprograms than $3 million, covering 1,400academic AFT local support, unions inhelp 22 states.

From provide students getsmall back townsinto like Willmar, to cities like routines Minn., and encourage kidsChicago, to haveLos fun.

Angeles and New York, educators aretostepping up. and 6. Promote community schools build trust

safely to full in-person learning, including building the

Educators have just been through the second-most support systems to help students recover socially, challenging year of their professional lives. What’s emotionally and academically, and overcoming the the most challenging year? The one that starts this concerns andwill fears some parentswith have about sending fall.

Students return to school enormous their children to be school. needs.

There stillback won’t enough school counselors, psychologists or nurses. Far too many schools We must address those fears. The AFT, with the still need safety improvements. And there will be NAACP and others, recently polled parents of public enormous pressure to make up for lost time.

remove obstacles to getting kids and families the support and services they need.

AFT Cincinnati, St. Louis, 7. members Increaseinthe emphasisPittsburgh on civics,and science and and throughout Massachusetts, going critical door tothinking door, project-based learning, toare nurture visitingand students’ homes to talk about the health and bring learning to life. safety and education programs in place, to encourage 8. Use funds from the American Rescue Plan to fill families to send their children back for in-person learning.

shortages of teachers, counselors, psychologists

In some our unions are working to increase andplaces, nurses. vaccination rates.

Otherstask are contacting families 9. Launch a federal force to rethink accountwhoseability—how children had limited or nostudent attendance last and we assess learning year. All have goal ofwhat “backreally to school for all.” how to the measure counts.

10.much Engage educators and As as westakeholders—families, want to feel “normal” again, we can do ensure funds in the bettercommunity than the oldpartners—to normal of test-based accountability systems and vastRescue inequality. we other returnfederal to full-time American PlanAsand funds for in-person schooling, we have a unique schools are spent equitably and opportunity effectively. to pursue new initiatives to help all kids thrive.

We are all yearning to move forward after this difficult

Reading matters.

That’s that why the AFT being is year. Forreally our young people, means back in redoubling ourtheir workpeers to help improve school, with andeducators caring adults, with all the their instruction in research-based literacy, whatever supports they need. their subject or grade level—with an emphasis on under-resourced schools. And we country, are working Despite all the divisions in our theretois a expand community to connectofstudents consensus aroundschools the importance strong public and families servicesvital rightnow, in thewhen school. schools.

Thattoisvital especially we need our

schools to provide to athis great, When students returnaccess to school fall,well-rounded they will bring education to spark passion for we learning and help with them the scars ofkids’ a long struggle wish they them recover sociallyand andeducators emotionally. hadn’t had to endure, will help them recover and feel safe and welcome. But students will We bring have with a rarethem chance seedand a renaissance in also theirtohopes their potential.

American public education.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime And teachers will get back to what brought them to opportunity only to reopen andtheir recover, but to this hope-fillednot profession—helping students reimagine our their schools in a but wayachieve that makes not only dream dreams them.every public school a place where parents want to send their children, educators and support staff want to work and students thrive.

Educators are preparing to be back in The United Statesfull willtime—because not be fully back school in person, until we arestudents fully backneed. in school. that’s what

school students. Only 73 percent of parents—and

But are of preparing to be back in they are onlyeducators 59 percent Black parents—said school in person, time—because comfortable withfullin-person learningthey for their child this know that’s what students need. fall. But if the safety and education measures the AFT

is calling for are in risks, place,particularly the comfort level There are continued from thejumps to 94 percent parents, including 87 percent of Black delta variant,ofwhich is causing alarming increases It’sinclear thatwith mitigation measures to prevent inparents. infections places low vaccination rates. the spread of the coronavirus create trust, as does

Yet schools can fully reopen this fall in person—with collaboration between schools and families. COVID-19 ventilation upgrades; social, emotional and academic vaccinesfor have been real and it’s great supports students; and game-changers, the resources needed vaccine has been approved for tonews do allthat this.the ThePfizer Centers for Disease Control 12- Prevention to 15-year-olds. and issued new guidance this week detailing mitigation measures schools should employ, My union is all-in. We are pressing for those safety recognizing that not everyone has been vaccinated.

and education measures in schools across the country.

students recover—socially, emotionally and But some families still have reservations.

academically. And we must reimagine teaching and

People whose loved ones have gotten sick or died learning to focus on what sparks students’ passion, from COVID-19 may have heightened fears about builds confidence, nurtures critical thinking and brings sending their children to school. Families may be learningthat to life—so all childrenwill have access skeptical safety precautions be in place.to the

opportunities that give them the freedom to thrive.

Sherman Photo:Photo: Brett Brett Sherman

With from the coronavirus package and And funding we are dedicating $5 millionrescue to a “Back to School the Rescue Plan,campaign communities throughout the forAmerican Everyone” national to connect not just country are making safer.but Lastalso month, with teachers andschools school staff withI visited families the Luther King Jr. Educational in New andMartin communities, to build trust andCampus confidence in York City with United Federation of Teachers President children returning to school, particularly those who Michael Mulgrew. We fought for years to get the have been learning remotely. ventilation system at MLK fixed. Now, with federal funds and from outside the UFT brought the Buthelp we must do moreexperts than physically return in, to schools, city has fixed it,asand students and staff at MLK canwefinally as important that is to create the normalcy breathe healthy Asput an asthmatic, I felt it immediately. crave. We mustair. also in place the supports to help

Students in Carle Place, N.Y., share what they learned about owls Weingarten speaking at AFT headquarters in Washington, D.C., with Weingarten, foreground, onMay May13.

4.

Follow FollowAFT AFTPresident PresidentRandi RandiWeingarten: Weingarten:twitter.com/RWeingarten twitter.com/RWeingarten Read ReadWeingarten’s Weingarten’sspeech: speech:aft.org/renaissance aft.org/renaissance

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